The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS): spectral
  classification through Principal Component Analysis
  We develop a Principal Component Analysis aimed at classifying a sub-set of
27,350 spectra of galaxies in the range 0.4 < z < 1.0 collected by the VIMOS
Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). We apply an iterative algorithm
to simultaneously repair parts of spectra affected by noise and/or sky
residuals, and reconstruct gaps due to rest-frame transformation, and obtain a
set of orthogonal spectral templates that span the diversity of galaxy types.
By taking the three most significant components, we find that we can describe
the whole sample without contamination from noise. We produce a catalogue of
eigen-coefficients and template spectra that will be part of future VIPERS data
releases. Our templates effectively condense the spectral information into two
coefficients that can be related to the age and star formation rate of the
galaxies. We examine the spectrophotometric types in this space and identify
early, intermediate, late and starburst galaxies.
