This document discusses dimensionality reduction techniques. Dimensionality reduction reduces the number of random variables under consideration to address issues like sparsity and less similarity between data points. It is accomplished through feature selection, which omits redundant/irrelevant features, or feature extraction, which maps features into a lower dimensional space. Dimensionality reduction provides advantages like less complexity, storage needs, computation time and improved model accuracy. Popular techniques include principal component analysis (PCA), which extracts new variables, and filtering methods. PCA involves standardizing data, computing correlations via the covariance matrix, and identifying principal components via eigenvectors and eigenvalues.