# What are correlation coefficients used for in PCA?

What are correlation coefficients used for in PCA?

One can discover them through the PCA formulation, but what are they useful for?

Maybe you mean the correlations between variables or features in the original vs reduced space? In this case, one can find that: $$\rho(X_i,Y_j) = \omega_{ij} \frac{\sigma(Y_j)}{\sigma(X_i)}$$ where $\rho$ is the correlation, $\omega_{ij}$ is the weight of variable $i$ for principal component $j$, $X_i$ is a data feature, $Y_j$ is the $j$th principal component, and $\sigma$ measures the standard deviation.
The interpretation of this is that it tells us how important the $i$th feature is in computing the $j$th principal component, through $\omega_{ij}$. But recall that the PCs are essentially ordered by importance, i.e. how much variability in the data they explain. Hence, if we find that some features contribute heavily to earlier PCs, then we can say that they are more useful in explaining the data than those features which do not contribute much to the more important PCs.