Factor analysis
Factor analysis is similar to principal component analysis, in that factor analysis also involves linear combinations of variables. Different from PCA, factor analysis is a correlation-focused approach seeking to reproduce the inter-correlations among variables, in which the factors "represent the common variance of variables, excluding unique variance". In terms of the correlation matrix, this corresponds with focusing on explaining the off-diagonal terms (that is, shared co-variance), while PCA focuses on explaining the terms that sit on the diagonal. However, as a side result, when trying to reproduce the on-diagonal terms, PCA also tends to fit relatively well the off-diagonal correlations. Results given by PCA and factor analysis are very similar in most situations, but this is not always the case, and there are some problems where the results are significantly different. Factor analysis is generally used when the research purpose is detecting data structure (that is, latent constructs or factors) or causal modeling. If the factor model is incorrectly formulated or the assumptions are not met, then factor analysis will give erroneous results.