[drongoking]

There's an odd jump in this narrative. PCA is indeed a great technique, but the essay goes from PCA to neural nets without explaining why. PCA was around for a long time before NNs and there are fast incremental ways to do it. Why bother with a million-weight NN if PCA will do the job?

[escanor]

My understanding is that the neural network is used to predict the "magnitude" of each eigenvector/axe (extracted by using PCA) in order to reconstruct an approximation of the original behavior.