  Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most commonly used
statistical procedures with a wide range of applications. This paper considers
both minimax and adaptive estimation of the principal subspace in the high
dimensional setting. Under mild technical conditions, we first establish the
optimal rates of convergence for estimating the principal subspace which are
sharp with respect to all the parameters, thus providing a complete
characterization of the difficulty of the estimation problem in term of the
convergence rate. The lower bound is obtained by calculating the local metric
entropy and an application of Fano's lemma. The rate optimal estimator is
constructed using aggregation, which, however, might not be computationally
feasible. We then introduce an adaptive procedure for estimating the principal
subspace which is fully data driven and can be computed efficiently. It is
shown that the estimator attains the optimal rates of convergence
simultaneously over a large collection of the parameter spaces. A key idea in
our construction is a reduction scheme which reduces the sparse PCA problem to
a high-dimensional multivariate regression problem. This method is potentially
also useful for other related problems.
