One strong variable load on components in principal component analysis?

Question

Hello and good day to you. I am using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation to analyze variables on my research.

There are 20 variables and 6 components were extracted. From the result, I noticed that the variables were strongly loaded on one component.

And I attached the Rotated component Matrix which I got from the PCA analysis.

As you can see from the picture there were 10 different variables which put into the first component

I don't know where did I makes mistakes of where the fault is coming from, can anybody please give me a suggestion? Thank You.

What is your goal in using PCA? And are your variables measured without error? — rolando2, Sep 28 '19 at 20:36
Thats my question, is it a problem when many factors were group into only one strong dimension. My goal using PCA was for grouping the 20 factors into different component dimensions — Confused_Scruff, Sep 29 '19 at 15:31

mkt · Answer 1 · 2019-10-01T12:02:09.767

3

There's no indication that there's any mistake here. PCA is a dimension reduction technique, so it will find orthogonal vectors. If you have many correlated variables, it's not surprising that many of them will be strongly loaded onto a single dimension.

It might be worth your time to read our most-upvoted thread on CV, which has many great explanations of what PCA is and how it works.

edited Oct 01 '19 at 12:02

answered Sep 28 '19 at 16:07

mkt

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One strong variable load on components in principal component analysis?

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