Principal Points and Self-Consistent Points of Elliptical Distributions

Abstract

The $k$ principal points of a $p$-variate random vector $\mathbf{X}$ are those points $\xi_1, \ldots, \xi_k \in \mathbb{R}^p$ which approximate the distribution of $\mathbf{X}$ by minimizing the expected squared distance of $\mathbf{X}$ from the nearest of the $\xi_j$. Any set of $k$ points $\mathbf{y}_1, \ldots, \mathbf{y}_k$ partitions $\mathbb{R}^p$ into "domains of attraction" $D_1, \ldots, D_k$ according to minimal distance; following Hastie and Stuetzle we call $\mathbf{y}_1, \ldots, \mathbf{y}_k$ self-consistent if $E\lbrack\mathbf{X}\mid\mathbf{X} \in D_j\rbrack = \mathbf{y}_j$ for $j = 1, \ldots, k$. Principal points are a special case of self-consistent points. In this paper we study principal points and self-consistent points of $p$-variate elliptical distributions. The main results are the following: (1) If $k$ self-consistent points of $\mathbf{X}$ span a subspace of dimension $q < p$, then this subspace is also spanned by $q$ principal components, that is, self-consistent points of elliptical distributions exist only in principal component subspaces. (2) The subspace spanned by $k$ principal points of $\mathbf{X}$ is identical with the subspace spanned by the principal components associated with the largest roots. This proves a conjecture of Flury. We also discuss implications of our results for the computation and estimation of principal points.