The Role of Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors in Principal Component Analysis

Date: 

Thursday, April 24, 2014, 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: 

1737 Cambridge Street, Knafel building, K450

Factor analysis is a common data reduction technique used in the social
sciences to uncover the latent structure or dimensions of a set of variables.
This presentation will discuss the matrix algebra behind factor analysis. 
We will focus on the process of matrix diagonalization and the role of 
eigenvectors and eigenvalues and their relations to the underlying dimensions.