Random Projection

Random projection reduces dimensionality by multiplying the data by a random matrix, relying on the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma (1984), which guarantees that projecting onto enough random directions approximately preserves all pairwise distances. Unlike PCA it does not analyze the data at all — the projection is random and data-oblivious — making it extremely cheap and well suited to very high-dimensional data and streaming or privacy-sensitive settings.