268k views

### What are the differences between Factor Analysis and Principal Component Analysis?

It seems that a number of the statistical packages that I use wrap these two concepts together. However, I'm wondering if there are different assumptions or data 'formalities' that must be true to use ...
241k views

### What are principal component scores?

What are principal component scores (PC scores, PCA scores)?
48k views

### Is PCA followed by a rotation (such as varimax) still PCA?

I have tried to reproduce some research (using PCA) from SPSS in R. In my experience, principal() function from package psych ...
165k views

### Loadings vs eigenvectors in PCA: when to use one or another?

In principal component analysis (PCA), we get eigenvectors (unit vectors) and eigenvalues. Now, let us define loadings as $$\text{Loadings} = \text{Eigenvectors} \cdot \sqrt{\text{Eigenvalues}}.$$ I ...
27k views

### How to visualize what canonical correlation analysis does (in comparison to what principal component analysis does)?

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a technique related to principal component analysis (PCA). While it is easy to teach PCA or linear regression using a scatter plot (see a few thousand examples ...
17k views

### How does Factor Analysis explain the covariance while PCA explains the variance?

Here is a quote from Bishop's "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" book, section 12.2.4 "Factor analysis": According to the highlighted part, factor analysis captures the covariance between ...
50k views

### What is the intuitive reason behind doing rotations in Factor Analysis/PCA & how to select appropriate rotation?

My Questions What is the intuitive reason behind doing rotations of factors in factor analysis (or components in PCA)? My understanding is, if variables are almost equally loaded in the top ...
18k views

### PCA and Correspondence analysis in their relation to Biplot

Biplot is often used to display results of principal component analysis (and of related techniques). It is a dual or overlay scatterplot showing component loadings and component scores simultaneously. ...
50k views

### How to compute varimax-rotated principal components in R?

I ran PCA on 25 variables and selected the top 7 PCs using prcomp. prc <- prcomp(pollutions, center=T, scale=T, retx=T) I ...
16k views

### PCA and exploratory Factor Analysis on the same dataset: differences and similarities; factor model vs PCA

I would like to know if it makes any logical sense to perform principal component analysis (PCA) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on the same data set. I have heard professionals expressly ...
22k views

### Steps done in factor analysis compared to steps done in PCA

I know how to perform PCA (principal component analysis), but I would like to know steps that should be used for factor analysis. To perform PCA, let us consider some matrix $A$, for instance: ...
71k views

While reading about PCA, I came across the following explanation: Suppose we have a data set where each data point represents a single student's scores on a math test, a physics test, a reading ...
17k views

### Creating a single index from several principal components or factors retained from PCA/FA

I am using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to create an index required for my research. My question is how I should create a single index by using the retained principal components calculated ...