Dimensionality reduction of spectral data
Author: Leonardo Ramirez-Lopez
Date: 2026-08-30

> Probability mass concentrates near regions that have a much smaller dimensionality than the original space where the data lives – (Bengio et al., 2013)

# 1 Introduction

Exploratory analysis of spectral data is often affected by the curse of dimensionality. In near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, for example, a single spectrum may contain measurements at hundreds to thousands of highly correlated wavelengths. Tasks such as pattern detection, similarity assessment, and outlier detection therefore often require reducing the dimensionality of the spectra while retaining the most relevant information.

Principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares (PLS) are among the most widely used methods for dimensionality reduction in spectroscopic analysis. Both methods are based on the idea that the meaningful structure of spectral data lies in a lower-dimensional subspace. They seek to construct a projection that transforms the original variables into a smaller set of latent variables that provides a more compact representation of the data while preserving its dominant structure.

The main difference between PCA and PLS lies in the criterion used to define the latent variables. In PCA, the objective is to obtain orthogonal components that explain as much variation in the predictor matrix as possible. In PLS, the objective is to obtain latent variables that maximize the covariance between the predictor matrix and one or more external variables, such as response variables or side information.

In PCA and PLS, the input spectra (\(X\), of dimensions \(n \times d\)) are decomposed into a score matrix (\(T\)) and a loading matrix (\(P\)), such that

\[ X = TP^\top + E \]

where the dimensions of \(T\) and \(P\) are \(n \times o\) and \(d \times o\), respectively, \(o\) is the number of retained components, and \(E\) is the residual matrix (reconstruction error). In PCA, the columns of \(P\) are orthonormal (\(P^\top P = I\)), which allows new observations to be projected directly onto the latent space. For centered data, the maximum number of components that can be retained is \(\min(n - 1, d)\).

Once a projection model has been estimated, new observations can be projected onto the same latent space. If \(X_{\mathrm{new}}\) denotes a matrix of new spectra preprocessed in the same way as the original data, their scores can be obtained as

\[ T_{\mathrm{new}} = X_{\mathrm{new}} P \]

where \(P\) contains the loading vectors defining the projection space.

The `resemble` package provides the function `ortho_projection()` to compute orthogonal projections of spectral data using PCA- and PLS-based methods. These projections can be used for exploratory analysis, visualization, dissimilarity analysis, neighbor search, and predictive modeling.

# 2 Methods available in the `resemble` package

In the `resemble` package, orthogonal projections based on PCA and PLS are computed with the `ortho_projection()` function.

The function provides the following algorithms for PCA:

- `"pca"`: standard PCA computed by singular value decomposition (SVD).

- `"pca_nipals"`: PCA computed with the nonlinear iterative partial least squares (NIPALS) algorithm (Wold, 1975).

For PLS, the available algorithms are:

- `"pls"`: standard partial least squares decomposition computed with the NIPALS algorithm. The projection is guided by external variables provided in `Yr`, so that the latent variables maximize the covariance between the spectral predictors and the side information.

- `"mpls"`: modified partial least squares, also computed with the NIPALS algorithm. Unlike standard PLS, which derives weights from covariances, this method uses correlations between `Xr` and `Yr`, reducing the influence of predictor variance on the projection (Shenk and Westerhaus, 1991).

- `"simpls"`: partial least squares computed with the SIMPLS algorithm (De Jong, 1993), which is often computationally more efficient than NIPALS for high-dimensional data.

# 3 Selecting the number of components

One of the critical decisions in dimensionality reduction is determining how many latent variables to extract. Retaining too few components risks discarding meaningful information, while retaining too many may introduce noise or lead to overfitting in subsequent modeling steps.

The `resemble` package provides a set of constructor functions for specifying component selection criteria. These functions return specification objects that are passed to the `ncomp` argument of `ortho_projection()` and related functions:

Function | Criterion
--- | ---
`ncomp_by_var()` | Individual variance threshold
`ncomp_by_cumvar()` | Cumulative variance threshold
`ncomp_by_opc()` | Optimal selection via nearest-neighbor evaluation
`ncomp_fixed()` | Fixed number of components

Alternatively, passing a positive integer directly to `ncomp` is equivalent to using `ncomp_fixed()`.

## 3.1 Variance-based selection

The simplest approach is to retain components based on the amount of variance they explain.

### 3.1.1 Individual variance threshold (`ncomp_by_var()`)

Retains all components that individually explain at least a specified proportion of the total variance:

    library(resemble)
    library(prospectr)

    # obtain a numeric vector of the wavelengths at which spectra is recorded
    wavs <- as.numeric(colnames(NIRsoil$spc))

    # pre-process the spectra:
    # - use detrend
    # - use first order derivative
    diff_order <- 1
    poly_order <- 1
    window <- 7

    # Preprocess spectra
    NIRsoil$spc_pr <- savitzkyGolay(
      detrend(NIRsoil$spc, wav = wavs),
      m = diff_order, p = poly_order, w = window
    )
    train_x <- NIRsoil$spc_pr[NIRsoil$train == 1, ]
    train_y <- NIRsoil$Ciso[NIRsoil$train == 1]

    test_x  <- NIRsoil$spc_pr[NIRsoil$train == 0, ]
    test_y  <- NIRsoil$Ciso[NIRsoil$train == 0]

In the following examples, the default method (PCA with SVD) is used to compute the projection, but the same component selection criteria can be applied to any of the available methods.

    # Retain components that individually explain at least 1% of variance
    proj_var <- ortho_projection(train_x, ncomp = ncomp_by_var(0.01))
    proj_var

     Method:  pca
     Number of components retained:  8
     Number of observations and number of original variables:  618 694
     Original variance in Xr: 43.499

     Explained variances, ratio of explained variance, cumulative explained variance:

     Explained variance in Xr:
                               pc_1   pc_2   pc_3   pc_4   pc_5   pc_6  pc_7   pc_8
    var                      19.919 11.602 3.3862 2.7444 1.7983 1.2423 0.825 0.5364
    explained_var             0.458  0.267 0.0778 0.0631 0.0413 0.0286 0.019 0.0123
    cumulative_explained_var  0.458  0.725 0.8025 0.8656 0.9069 0.9355 0.954 0.9668

The above configuration of `ncomp_by_var(0.01)` retained a total of 8 components which are the ones that individually explain at least 1% of the total variance in the data.

### 3.1.2 Cumulative variance threshold (`ncomp_by_cumvar()`)

Retains the minimum number of components needed to reach a specified cumulative proportion of explained variance:

    # Retain enough components to explain at least 99% of variance
    proj_cumvar <- ortho_projection(train_x, ncomp = ncomp_by_cumvar(0.99))
    proj_cumvar

     Method:  pca
     Number of components retained:  14
     Number of observations and number of original variables:  618 694
     Original variance in Xr: 43.499

     Explained variances, ratio of explained variance, cumulative explained variance:

     Explained variance in Xr:
                               pc_1   pc_2   pc_3   pc_4   pc_5   pc_6  pc_7   pc_8
    var                      19.919 11.602 3.3862 2.7444 1.7983 1.2423 0.825 0.5364
    explained_var             0.458  0.267 0.0778 0.0631 0.0413 0.0286 0.019 0.0123
    cumulative_explained_var  0.458  0.725 0.8025 0.8656 0.9069 0.9355 0.954 0.9668
                                pc_9   pc_10   pc_11   pc_12   pc_13   pc_14
    var                      0.27659 0.21380 0.18978 0.15322 0.09713 0.08964
    explained_var            0.00636 0.00492 0.00436 0.00352 0.00223 0.00206
    cumulative_explained_var 0.97314 0.97806 0.98242 0.98594 0.98818 0.99024

The above configuration of `ncomp_by_cumvar(0.99)` retained a total of 14 components which are the minimum number of components needed to explain at least 99% of the total variance in the data.

## 3.2 Optimal component selection (`ncomp_by_opc()`)

Variance-based criteria consider only the structure of the predictor matrix. However, in supervised contexts, the goal is often to retain components that are relevant for capturing information realted to a response variable. The optimal component selection method (“opc”) addresses this by incorporating side information.

The method is based on the assumption that if two observations are similar in the spectral space, they should also be similar in terms of their side information (Ramirez-Lopez et al., 2013). For a sequence of retained components \(o = 1, 2, \ldots, k\), the function computes a dissimilarity matrix at each step and identifies the nearest spectral neighbor for each observation. The side information values of each observation are then compared with those of its nearest neighbor.

For continuous side information, the root mean squared difference (RMSD) is computed:

\[ j(i) = \mathrm{NN}(x_{r_i}, X_r^{\{-i\}}) \]

\[ \mathrm{RMSD} = \sqrt{\frac{1}{m} \sum_{i=1}^m (y_i - y_{j(i)})^2} \]

where \(j(i)\) is the index of the nearest neighbor of observation \(i\) (excluding itself), \(y_i\) is the side information value for observation \(i\), \(y_{j(i)}\) is the side information value for the nearest neighbor, and \(m\) is the total number of observations.

For categorical side information, the kappa index is used instead of RMSD.

The optimal number of components is the one that minimizes RMSD (or maximizes kappa). Note that in this case, the side information is represented by the response variable (`Ciso` in the `NIRSoil` dataset):

    # Optimal component selection using side information
    # using default max_ncomp which is 40
    proj_opc <- ortho_projection(train_x, Yr = train_y, ncomp = ncomp_by_opc())
    proj_opc

     Method:  pca
     Number of components retained:  20
     Number of observations and number of original variables:  618 694
     Original variance in Xr: 43.499

     Explained variances, ratio of explained variance, cumulative explained variance:

     Explained variance in Xr:
                               pc_1   pc_2   pc_3   pc_4   pc_5   pc_6  pc_7   pc_8
    var                      19.919 11.602 3.3862 2.7444 1.7983 1.2423 0.825 0.5364
    explained_var             0.458  0.267 0.0778 0.0631 0.0413 0.0286 0.019 0.0123
    cumulative_explained_var  0.458  0.725 0.8025 0.8656 0.9069 0.9355 0.954 0.9668
                                pc_9   pc_10   pc_11   pc_12   pc_13   pc_14
    var                      0.27659 0.21380 0.18978 0.15322 0.09713 0.08964
    explained_var            0.00636 0.00492 0.00436 0.00352 0.00223 0.00206
    cumulative_explained_var 0.97314 0.97806 0.98242 0.98594 0.98818 0.99024
                               pc_15   pc_16    pc_17   pc_18    pc_19    pc_20
    var                      0.06180 0.05757 0.038582 0.03610 0.029538 0.027219
    explained_var            0.00142 0.00132 0.000887 0.00083 0.000679 0.000626
    cumulative_explained_var 0.99166 0.99298 0.993868 0.99470 0.995377 0.996002

Using the OPC method, the optimal number of components is 20. Although this may appear large, these components are required to adequately represent similarities among observations in terms of the side information (here, the `Ciso` variable). In this sense, OPC provides a semi-supervised approach for extracting meaningful latent variables, where the side information is used only to determine the optimal number of components.

The “opc” method is particularly useful because it selects latent variables that are genuinely informative with respect to the response variable. By contrast, standard component-selection methods often underestimate the number of components needed to preserve similarities among observations in terms of the response.

Note that this method can take multiple variables as side information.

By default, up to 40 latent variables are evaluated. If fewer than 40 spectral variables are supplied to `ortho_projection()`, the number of spectral variables is used as the upper limit for the number of latent variables to test.

If fewer than 40 latent variables are to be evaluated, the `ncomp_by_opc()` method can be used to set a smaller upper limit. For example:

    # this needs to be passed to the ncomp argument in ortho_projection()
    ncomp_by_opc(max_ncomp = 15)

    Component selection: by OPC (max: 15)

## 3.3 Fixed number of components

When the number of components is known in advance, it can be specified directly:

    # Using ncomp_fixed()
    proj_fixed <- ortho_projection(train_x, ncomp = ncomp_fixed(10))

    # Equivalent: passing an integer directly
    proj_fixed <- ortho_projection(train_x, ncomp = 10)

# 4 Dimentionality reduction methods in `ortho_projection()`

The `ortho_projection()` function computes orthogonal projections based on PCA and PLS.

## 4.1 Available methods

The function provides the following algorithms for PCA:

- `"pca"`: standard PCA computed by singular value decomposition (SVD).
- `"pca_nipals"`: PCA computed with the nonlinear iterative partial least squares (NIPALS) algorithm (Wold, 1975).

For PLS, the available algorithms are:

- `"pls"`: standard partial least squares decomposition computed with the NIPALS algorithm. The projection is guided by external variables provided in `Yr`, so that the latent variables maximize the covariance between the spectral predictors and the side information.
- `"mpls"`: modified partial least squares, computed with the NIPALS algorithm. Weights are derived from correlations rather than covariances between `Xr` and `Yr`, giving equal influence to all predictors regardless of variance (Shenk and Westerhaus, 1991).
- `"simpls"`: partial least squares computed with the SIMPLS algorithm (De Jong, 1993), which is often computationally more efficient than NIPALS for high-dimensional data.

## 4.2 Example: PCA projection

    # PCA with default component selection (ncomp_by_var(0.01))
    pca_train <- ortho_projection(train_x, method = "pca")
    pca_train

    plot(pca_train)

Figure 1: Individual contribution to the explained variance for each component (left) and cumulative variance explained by the principal components (right).

In this dataset, 8 components are required to explain approximately 97% of the original variance in the spectra (Figure 1).

The NIPALS algorithm provides an alternative to SVD and can be faster when only a few components are required:

    # PCA using NIPALS
    pca_nipals_train <- ortho_projection(train_x, method = "pca_nipals")

## 4.3 Example: PLS projection

For PLS methods, side information (`Yr`) must be provided:

    # PLS using SIMPLS with 10 components
    pls_train <- ortho_projection(
      train_x,
      Yr = train_y,
      method = "simpls",
      ncomp = 10
    )
    pls_train

Observations with missing values in `Yr` are held out during model fitting, then projected using the resulting projection matrix and pooled with the results.

## 4.4 Example: Optimal component selection

    # PCA with optimal component selection
    pca_opc <- ortho_projection(
      train_x,
      Yr = train_y,
      method = "pca",
      ncomp = ncomp_by_opc(40)
    )
    pca_opc

    plot(pca_opc, col = "#F59E0B")

Figure 2: RMSD between observations and their nearest neighbors as a function of the number of principal components.

In this example, 20 components minimize the RMSD for Total Carbon (Figure 2).

# 5 Projecting new data

Both PCA and PLS generate projection matrices that can be used to project new observations onto the latent space. Use the `predict()` method:

    # Fit PLS projection model
    pls_model <- ortho_projection(
      train_x,
      Yr = train_y,
      method = "simpls",
      ncomp = ncomp_by_opc(40),
      scale = TRUE
    )

    # Project test data
    pls_test_scores <- predict(pls_model, newdata = test_x)

    plot(
      pls_model$scores[, 1:2],
      col = rgb(0.231, 0.51, 0.965, 0.3),
      pch = 16, cex = 1.5,
      xlab = "PLS1", ylab = "PLS2"
    )
    grid(lty = 1)
    points(
      pls_test_scores[, 1:2],
      col = rgb(0.961, 0.620, 0.043, 0.7),
      pch = 16, cex = 1.5
    )
    legend(
      "topright",
      legend = c("Training projection", "Predicted projection"),
      col = c(
        rgb(0.231, 0.51, 0.965, 0.3),
        rgb(0.961, 0.620, 0.043, 0.7)
      ),
      pch = 16,
      pt.cex = 1.5,
      box.col = "black"
    )

Figure 3: Projection of the training observations in the first two PLS components (blue) and projection of the test observations onto the same latent space (red).

Alternatively, training and test data can be projected in a single call by passing the test data to `Xu`:

    # Project training and test data simultaneously
    pca_both <- ortho_projection(
      train_x,
      Xu = test_x,
      Yr = train_y,
      method = "pca",
      ncomp = ncomp_by_opc(40),
      scale = TRUE
    )

For PCA, the training and test data are pooled, projected jointly, and then split for the final results. For `ncomp_by_opc()`, dissimilarity matrices are computed only on the training data with available side information.

# 6 Multivariate side information

The `ortho_projection()` function accepts multiple variables as side information:

    train_y2 <- NIRsoil$Nt[NIRsoil$train == 1]
    train_y3 <- NIRsoil$CEC[NIRsoil$train == 1]

    # PLS with multivariate side information
    pls_multi <- ortho_projection(
      train_x,
      Xu = test_x,
      Yr = cbind(train_y, train_y2, train_y3),
      method = "pca",
      ncomp = ncomp_by_opc(40),
      scale = TRUE
    )

    plot(pls_multi)

When multiple variables are provided, the PLS2 algorithm is used (Wold et al., 1983). For optimal component selection, the RMSD is computed for each variable, standardized, and averaged. The evaluation results for each variable are accessible via `$opc_evaluation`.

For categorical side information, the kappa index is used instead of RMSD.

# References

Bengio, Y., Courville, A., Vincent, P., 2013. Representation learning: A review and new perspectives. IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 35, 1798–1828.
De Jong, S., 1993. SIMPLS: An alternative approach to partial least squares regression. Chemometrics and intelligent laboratory systems 18, 251–263.
Ramirez-Lopez, L., Behrens, T., Schmidt, K., Stevens, A., Demattê, J., Scholten, T., 2013. The spectrum-based learner: A new local approach for modeling soil vis–NIR spectra of complex datasets. Geoderma 195, 268–279.
Shenk, J.S., Westerhaus, M.O., 1991. Populations structuring of near infrared spectra and modified partial least squares regression. Crop science 31, 1548–1555.
Wold, H., 1975. Soft modelling by latent variables: The non-linear iterative partial least squares (NIPALS) approach. Journal of Applied Probability 12, 117–142.
Wold, S., Martens, H., Wold, H., Ruhe, A., Kagstrom, B., 1983. The multivariate calibration method in chemistry solved by the PLS model, in: Proc. Conf. Matrix Pencils, Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, pp. 286–293.