Question

To conduct a principal component analysis PCA of data that is in 3 different groups of genera by taxonomic methods do you preform a EOF or is it just the PCA?

Answer 1

Principal component analysis (PCA) is often referred as data reduction technique and is a statistical technique that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. Also empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is a decomposition of data set in terms of orthogonal basis functions which are determined from the data and this technique is similar to  Principal component analysis (PCA) but empirical orthogonal function EOF method finds both time series and spatial patterns and provides much better representation to Geographical or spatial data. So it will be better to go for both the technique.