Factor Analysis - Exploratory Factor Analysis Versus Principal Components Analysis

Exploratory Factor Analysis Versus Principal Components Analysis

See also: Principal component analysis and Exploratory factor analysis

While exploratory factor analysis and principal component analysis are treated as synonymous techniques in some fields of statistics, this has been criticised (e.g. Fabrigar et al., 1999; Suhr, 2009). In factor analysis, the researcher makes the assumption that an underlying causal model exists, whereas PCA is simply a variable reduction technique. Researchers have argued that the distinctions between the two techniques may mean that there are objective benefits for preferring one over the other based on the analytic goal.

Read more about this topic:  Factor Analysis

Famous quotes containing the words factor, analysis, principal and/or components:

    “Children of the middle years do not do their learning unaffected by attendant feelings of interest, boredom, success, failure, chagrin, joy, humiliation, pleasure, distress and delight. They are whole children responding in a total way, and what they feel is a constant factor that can be constructive or destructive in any learning situation.”
    —Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)

    “... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
    —Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)

    “In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.”
    —Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)

    “Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
    —Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)