Talk:Factor analysis/Archives/2020

Suggestion
I am unfamiliar with how to make comments, and hope this note is helpful. I wonder if there could be a better reference support, in the third paragraph, for the suggestion that "Factor Analysis is related to principal component analysis, but the two are not identical". I have most often seen the usage as "Principal Components Factor Analysis" which seemingly places Principal Components as a type of Factor Analysis. Also, the Wikipedia author(s) might take a look a book that appears to be influential, but wasn't included in the references. That is, "A First Course in Factor Analysis", by Comrey and Lee, and published by Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Statguy1 (talk) 15:02, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Proposed merge or cleanup
Exploratory factor analysis and Confirmatory factor analysis have each their separate pages. The Factor analysis page contains a lot of redundant text, covering both topics. A lot of the text in the Factor analysis page actually refers to exploratory factor analysis only, though this is not clear from the text. I propose that this page is reduced to a short summary with links to the main articles on Exploratory factor analysis, Confirmatory factor analysis, and Principal component analysis.

The sections on applications in psychometrics, marketing, physical and biological sciences, and In microarray analysis should be moved to the appropriate page, i.e. Exploratory factor analysis. A section on application in culture studies may be added (see Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world. Agnerf (talk) 09:43, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Factor indeterminacy: a suggestion
I suggest that a paragraph be added describing the problem of Factor indeterminacy (cf, e.g., works by P.H. Schönemann (Schoenemann)) Harpbar (talk) 20:51, 15 December 2020 (UTC)