abstract = "Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is a standard
statistical technique, which is frequently employed in
the analysis of large highly correlated data-sets. As
it stands, PCA is a linear technique which can limit
its relevance to the highly non-linear systems
frequently encountered in the chemical process
industries. Several attempts to extend linear PCA to
cover non-linear data sets have been made, and will be
briefly reviewed in this paper. We propose a
symbolically oriented technique for non-linear PCA,
which is based on the Genetic Programming (GP)
paradigm. Its applicability will be demonstrated using
two simple non-linear systems and industrial data
collected from a distillation column. It is suggested
that the use of the GP based non-linear PCA algorithm
achieves the objectives of non-linear PCA, while giving
high a degree of structural parsimony.",