In statistics and signal processing, the method of empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis is a decomposition of a signal or data set in terms of orthogonal basis functions which are determined from the data. The term is also interchangeable with the geographically weighted Principal components analysis in geophysics. The i th basis function is chosen to be orthogonal to the basis functions from the first through i − 1, and to minimize the residual variance. That is, the basis functions are chosen to be different from each other, and to account for as much variance as possible.