Imagine you’re looking at a cartoon that changes a little bit in every frame—like a flipbook. Now let’s say you want to understand what’s happening in that cartoon in a super smart way. Here’s how these three tools help:

1. PCA (Principal Component Analysis)

Think of it like finding the best crayons.
You have a big coloring box with 100 crayons, but to draw the cartoon, you only need the 3 most important ones. PCA helps you pick those 3 crayons that draw most of the picture. It keeps things simple and still shows what’s going on.

2. ICA (Independent Component Analysis)

Imagine you hear two people talking at the same time.
ICA is like having super ears that can listen to both voices and separate them. If your cartoon has two things happening—like a dog running and a balloon flying—ICA tries to pull them apart and show each one clearly.

3. DMD (Dynamic Mode Decomposition)

It’s like finding the secret moves in your flipbook.
DMD looks at each page of your cartoon and figures out what is moving, how fast, and in what pattern. It's like saying, “This part spins slowly, that part bounces fast,” and so on.

So, PCA picks the best crayons, ICA separates voices or actions, and DMD finds the hidden dance in your flipbook!

now that we have the basic downs, in technical terms :

PCA (Principal Component Analysis)

Goal: Reduce dimensionality while retaining maximum variance.
How: It finds orthogonal directions (principal components) that capture the most energy (variance) in the data.

• You compute the covariance matrix of your dataset.
• Eigen-decompose it to get eigenvectors (directions of max variance) and eigenvalues (amount of variance).
• Project your data onto the top $k$ eigenvectors to compress the dataset while preserving structure.

Use case: De-noising data, compression, feature extraction — great when your data lies on a low-dimensional linear subspace.

ICA (Independent Component Analysis)

Goal: Separate mixed signals into statistically independent sources.
How: Goes beyond PCA by not just decorrelating (like PCA), but also enforcing statistical independence (e.g., minimizing mutual information or maximizing non-Gaussianity).

• Often used in blind source separation problems (like the classic “cocktail party problem”).
• Think of it as unmixing ingredients in a smoothie back into the original fruits.

Use case: Signal processing, EEG/fMRI analysis, situations where multiple independent sources are linearly mixed.

DMD (Dynamic Mode Decomposition)

Goal: Extract spatiotemporal coherent structures from data governed by (possibly nonlinear) dynamics.
How: Assumes your snapshots evolve linearly in time:
xk 1=Axkmathbf{x}_{k 1} = A mathbf{x}_kxk 1​=Axk​. DMD finds the best-fit linear operator $A$ and its eigen decomposition.

• You collect snapshots X=[x1,x2,...,xm−1]mathbf{X} = [x_1, x_2, ..., x_{m-1}]X=[x1​,x2​,...,xm−1​], X′=[x2,x3,...,xm]mathbf{X}' = [x_2, x_3, ..., x_m]X′=[x2​,x3​,...,xm​].
• You solve for A≈X′X†A approx X'X^daggerA≈X′X†, then perform eigen-decomposition (usually in reduced space via SVD).
• The eigenvalues capture growth/decay and frequency, and the eigenvectors (DMD modes) represent spatial patterns.

Use case: Fluid dynamics, video analysis, modal decomposition of dynamical systems — especially when you're interested in dominant modes with clear frequencies or growth/decay rates.

TL;DR:

Dr. Koppillil Radhakrishnan visited APSYS lab in January 2023 as a part of a visit to IIT Kharagpur India. Dr. Radhakrishnan is an Indian space scientist who headed the Indian Space Research Organisation between November 2009 and December 2014 as Chairman of Space Commission, Secretary of the Department of Space and Chairman of ISRO.

"Thank you for shaping the future with your wisdom, dedication, and guidance. Your impact on our life is immeasurable, and we are forever grateful. Happy Teacher’s Day!"

Multistep CFD simulations on HPC cluster using Fluent showing Heat Release Distribution