The dataset on American college and university rankings (available from www.dataminingbook.com) contains information on 1302 American colleges and universities offering an undergraduate program. For each university, there are 17 measurements that include continuous measurements (such as tuition and graduation rate) and categorical measurements (such as location by state and whether it is a private or a public school).

a. Remove all categorical attributes.  Then remove all records with missing numerical measurements from the dataset.

b. Conduct a principal component analysis on the cleaned data and comment on the results. Should the data be normalized? Discuss what characterizes the components you consider key.