Principal Axis Factoring

I'm just going to put a brief mention up here on principal axis factoring, a theoretical statistical method used to analyze common variance.  Principal axis factoring, also known as principal factor analysis or common factor analysis, is the most commonly used method in factor analysis.  According to Wikipedia, it "seeks the least number of factors which can account for the common variance (correlation) of a set of variables".  Factors are determined through the analysis of the common variance.


This concept of factor analysis is beyond the concepts that I would like to explain on my blog. It is much more of a university-level statistics concept than any of the other concepts that I have described so far.  If you would like a more thorough explanation of principal axis factoring, I highly suggest that you perform a Google search or find a good reference text book.  I mention it here only because of my recent posts on methods of factoring, and I was asked to specifically to reference this factoring method.