  This paper is concerned with the analysis of correlation between two
high-dimensional data sets when there are only few correlated signal components
but the number of samples is very small, possibly much smaller than the
dimensions of the data. In such a scenario, a principal component analysis
(PCA) rank-reduction preprocessing step is commonly performed before applying
canonical correlation analysis (CCA). We present simple, yet very effective
approaches to the joint model-order selection of the number of dimensions that
should be retained through the PCA step and the number of correlated signals.
These approaches are based on reduced-rank versions of the Bartlett-Lawley
hypothesis test and the minimum description length information-theoretic
criterion. Simulation results show that the techniques perform well for very
small sample sizes even in colored noise.
