[Devilstro]

In the article, you mention this approach requires no search over hyper-parameter, because the method comprises a closed-form solution with "simple" linear algebra. I agree with this, but do you not in think need to tune the L2-regularization strength? That would for me be a hyper-parameter you would need to do a CV over (or similarly).

[pleshkov]

Fair point — lam is technically a hyperparameter. In practice I used lam=1e-3 (the default in the code) across all four models without tuning, and the gap to PCA is robust enough that small variations don't change the conclusion. So more accurately: "one hyperparameter with a benign default" rather than "no hyperparameters" — you're right I overstated.