Exploratory Factor Analysis with SAS

Extraction Techniques

Seven EFA extraction techniques are available in SAS. These methods span the range of options commonly used by researchers and include all methods generally available in other common statistical software applications (e.g., SPSS, STATA). Each is further described below.

Principal axes factor (PAF) extraction is a variation of PCA. This method replaces the diagonal elements of the matrix of associations (e.g., correlation or covariance matrix) with the initial communality estimates, or initial estimates of the shared variance. In PCA this substitution does not occur, effectively permitting PCA to estimate components using all of the variance and not just the shared variance, When this substation occurs, it acknowledges ...