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Calculate Volume in a PCA

Katja Seis wrote:
Not really quite enough information here , although some googling suggests
that
you are looking for a technique used in MRI studies?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22pca%20volume%22&itool=QuerySuggestion

  as a wild guess, I'm going to suggest that the answer **might** be that
you should
take your PCA standard deviations and use the formula for the volume of a
(hyper)-ellipsoid
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid#Volume].  I don't know the general
formula
(pi*s_1*s_2 for an ellipse, 4/3*pi*s_1*s_2*s_3 for an ellipsoid ...) but in
any case the
answer is in general proportional to the product of all of the standard
deviations ...
for a princomp() fit, prod(x$sdev).  In general you can do this without
calculating
PCA explicitly -- if your data matrix is d, then
prod(sqrt(diag(eigen(vcov(d))$values)))
should do it.

  Of course, I haven't tested or proofread these suggestions carefully, use
at your
own risk ...