Basic factor analysis in R
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The call to perform factor analysis on a set of variables in R is:
fact1<- factanal(x,factors,scores=c(“regression”),rotation=”varimax”)
where “x” is a dataframe containing the appropriate variables, and “factors” is the number of factors to be extracted.
socres=”…” and rotation=”…” are optional, and varimax is the default rotation.
The factanal function doesn’t seem to handle missing observations well, so it’s easier to create a new dataframe based on your original, with the missing values omitted:
x1<-na.omit(x)
To view the summary of the factor analysis, simply type the name of the object under which the analysis was saved.
fact1
To view the scores, use
fact1$scores
To view a scree plot, install the “psy” package load it
install.packages(“psy”)
library(psy)
Then type
scree.plot(fact1$correlations)
The above commands and options are only the very basics. For more information, view the documentation for the factanal function. For more information about factor analysis in general, here is a nice nontechnical introduction.
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