The SA
function calculates the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of feature-sampling adequacy (Kaiser & Rice, 1974).
It provides a practical option for the assessment of factorability.
Factorability refers to the assessment of the ability to identify coherent common latent factors from a given correlation matrix.
In common factor analysis the observed features are assumed to be independent given the common latent features.
Under this crucial model assumption, the inverse of the population correlation matrix is diagonal.
Hence, to assess factorability one could assess if the inverse of the sample correlation matrix is near-diagonal.
The KMO index provides for such an assessment by "comparing the sizes of the off-diagonal entries of the regularized correlation matrix to the sizes of the off-diagonal entries of its scaled inverse" (Peeters et al., 2019).
It takes values in \([0,1]\) and larger values are preferred.
A KMO index between .9 and 1 would be considered to be indicative of great factorability.
For rules of thumb regarding interpretation of KMO index value, see Kaiser (1970).
The SA
function calculates an overall KMO index as well as the KMO index per observed feature.
The intended usage of the SA
function is to assess if performing a factor analysis on a given (regularized) correlation matrix can be considered appropriate. As such, it succeeds usage of the regcor
function (for high-dimensional and/or strongly collinear settings) and precedes
usage of the dimGB
and mlFA
functions.