Pulling the principal components out of a DimensionReducerFunction?

Question

Suppose I perform dimension reduction using PCA:

dr = DimensionReduction[{{1, 2, 3}, {2, 3, 5}, {3, 5, 8}, {4, 5, 
    8.5}}, Method -> "PrincipalComponentsAnalysis"]

If I want to see the principal components themselves, in the original space, one thought is to use the "OriginalData" feature of the DimensionReducerFunction, on basis vectors in the new space:

In[8]:= dr[{1.0, 0.0}, "OriginalData"]
dr[{0.0, 1.0}, "OriginalData"]

Out[8]= {1.86006, 2.9998, 4.81724}

Out[9]= {3.38701, 3.01026, 5.64163}

Is this a reasonable thing to do, or am I misinterpreting how the "OriginalData" feature works? And is there a better way to pull out the principal components themselves? People often want to visualize these for various reasons.

(There are several other questions about how to solve a similar problem with the PrincipalComponents function; this is a question about a different function.)

Answer 1

Here's your data:

data = {{1, 2, 3}, {2, 3, 5}, {3, 5, 8}, {4, 5, 8.5}};
dr = DimensionReduction[data, Method -> "PrincipalComponentsAnalysis"];

This is not exactly a top level solution, but we can pick apart the DimensionReducerFunction and see inside (try dr[[1]] to see many internal properties).

Looking further, in there we have a matrix:

Transpose[dr[[1, "Model", "Matrix"]]]

{{-0.572383, -0.577502, -0.582125}, {0.793367, -0.56945, -0.215163}}

I think these are the components. We can try to verify:

Transpose[Last[SingularValueDecomposition[Standardize[data], 2]]]

{{-0.572383, -0.577502, -0.582125}, {0.793367, -0.56945, -0.215163}}