This document discusses dimension reduction methods such as principal component analysis (PCA). It explains that PCA seeks to reduce the number of predictor variables by creating a smaller number of linear combinations called principal components. These components account for most of the information in the original variables. The document discusses different criteria for determining how many components to retain such as the eigenvalue criterion, proportion of variance explained criterion, and scree plot criterion. It also provides an example of performing PCA on a housing dataset.