Statistics add-in software for statistical analysis in Excel
  • Statistical Reference Guide
  • Principal component analysis (PCA)

Scree plot

A scree plot visualizes the dimensionality of the data.

The scree plot shows the cumulative variance explained by each principal component. You can make decision on the number of components to keep to adequately describe a dataset using ad-hoc rules such as components with a variance > 0.7 or where the cumulative proportion of variation is > 80% or > 90% (Jolliffe 2002)

Related concepts
Principal components
Related tasks
Calculating principal components
Related information
Jolliffe, I. (2002). Principal component analysis. Springer-Verlag, New York, Inc.
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Version 6.15
Published 18-Apr-2023
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