A study of an identification problem and substitute use of principal component analysis in factor analysis (Q1210046)

Part I treats an identification problem of the Factor Analysis (FA) model. This problem is fundamental and important. In Section 1, the identification problem is described in detail. In section 2, the existence of a decomposition is discussed. In Section 3, uniqueness of the decompositions is discussed. The author attempted to study this problem systematically and some new results are obtained. Part II deals with an adequacy problem of Principal Components Analysis (PCA) as substitute use for FA. In practice, PCA is very often for the same purpose as FA without careful consideration. In Section 4, an approach of investigating PCA as a substitute for FA is introduced. In Section 5, monofactor cases are treated. Finally, in Section 6, multifactor cases are treated. The present paper tries to clarify proper use of PCA as a substitute for FA.