  Feature extraction and dimensionality reduction are important tasks in many
fields of science dealing with signal processing and analysis. The relevance of
these techniques is increasing as current sensory devices are developed with
ever higher resolution, and problems involving multimodal data sources become
more common. A plethora of feature extraction methods are available in the
literature collectively grouped under the field of Multivariate Analysis (MVA).
This paper provides a uniform treatment of several methods: Principal Component
Analysis (PCA), Partial Least Squares (PLS), Canonical Correlation Analysis
(CCA) and Orthonormalized PLS (OPLS), as well as their non-linear extensions
derived by means of the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. We also
review their connections to other methods for classification and statistical
dependence estimation, and introduce some recent developments to deal with the
extreme cases of large-scale and low-sized problems. To illustrate the wide
applicability of these methods in both classification and regression problems,
we analyze their performance in a benchmark of publicly available data sets,
and pay special attention to specific real applications involving audio
processing for music genre prediction and hyperspectral satellite images for
Earth and climate monitoring.
