Ecological Investigation of the Ganges River Using Principal Component Analysis

摘要

Principal component analysis is a powerful "pattern recognition" approach that seeks to explain the variance in a large set of intercorre-lated variables by using a smaller set of independent variables, or principal components (Hopke, 1985).rnThe study described here used PCA to investigate water quality in the Ganges River. Our research identified the principal physical, chemical, and bacteriological parameters that are important in predicting surface-water quality.