ERIC Number: EJ1185008
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018-Aug
Pages: 5
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0013-1644
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On the Unlikely Case of an Error-Free Principal Component from a Set of Fallible Measures
Raykov, Tenko; Marcoulides, George A.; Li, Tenglong
Educational and Psychological Measurement, v78 n4 p708-712 Aug 2018
This note extends the results in the 2016 article by Raykov, Marcoulides, and Li to the case of correlated errors in a set of observed measures subjected to principal component analysis. It is shown that when at least two measures are fallible, the probability is zero for any principal component--and in particular for the first principal component--to be error-free. In conjunction with the findings in Raykov et al., it is concluded that in practice no principal component can be perfectly reliable for a set of observed variables that are not all free of measurement error, whether or not their error terms correlate, and hence no principal component can practically be error-free.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
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Language: English
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