Principal component analysis of different economic traits in livestock & poultry: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Principal component analysis is a mathematical technique which condenses a large collection of variables into a smaller set that still contains the majority of data in a large set. In simple term it transform a number of possibly correlated variables into smaller number of uncorrelated variables. It has been used in various fields of science and is a main part of plant and animal breeding where it helps in selection of superior and high performing animals/ plants. In the field of Animal Genetics and Breeding principal component analysis has been used in variety of animal species (cattle, buffalo, goat, sheep, pig, poultry). The various software are present that helps in carrying out principal component analysis. As there are various scientist working on various experiments, this generates a huge amount of data which is impossible to interpret. Therefore, to ease the calculations and to save the time from analyzing this huge set of data scientist turn towards principal component analysis. This becomes most widely used and acceptable method for analysis of huge set of data.