Overview: FACTOR Procedure

The FACTOR procedure performs a variety of common factor and component analyses and rotations. Input can be multivariate data, a correlation matrix, a covariance matrix, a factor pattern, or a matrix of scoring coefficients. The procedure can factor either the correlation or covariance matrix, and you can save most results in an output data set.

PROC FACTOR can process output from other procedures. For example, it can rotate the canonical coefficients from multivariate analyses in the GLM procedure.

The methods for factor extraction are principal component analysis, principal factor analysis, iterated principal factor analysis, unweighted least squares factor analysis, maximum likelihood (canonical) factor analysis, alpha factor analysis, image component analysis, and Harris component analysis. A variety of methods for prior communality estimation is also available.

Specific methods for orthogonal rotation are varimax, quartimax, biquartimax, equamax, parsimax, and factor parsimax. Oblique versions of these methods are also available. In addition, quartimin, biquartimin, and covarimin methods for (direct) oblique rotation are available. General methods for orthogonal rotation are orthomax with user-specified gamma, Crawford-Ferguson family with user-specified weights on variable parsimony and factor parsimony, and generalized Crawford-Ferguson family with user-specified weights. General methods for oblique rotation are direct oblimin with user-specified tau, Crawford-Ferguson family with user-specified weights on variable parsimony and factor parsimony, generalized Crawford-Ferguson family with user-specified weights, promax with user-specified exponent, Harris-Kaiser case II with user-specified exponent, and Procrustes with a user-specified target pattern.

Output includes means, standard deviations, correlations, Kaiser’s measure of sampling adequacy, eigenvalues, a scree plot, eigenvectors, prior and final communality estimates, the unrotated factor pattern, residual and partial correlations, the rotated primary factor pattern, the primary factor structure, interfactor correlations, the reference structure, reference axis correlations, the variance explained by each factor both ignoring and eliminating other factors, plots of both rotated and unrotated factors, squared multiple correlation of each factor with the variables, standard error estimates, confidence limits, coverage displays, and scoring coefficients.

The FACTOR procedure now uses ODS Graphics to create graphs as part of its output. For general information about ODS Graphics, see Chapter 21, Statistical Graphics Using ODS.

Any topics that are not given explicit references are discussed in Mulaik (1972) or Harman (1976).