Сравнение на методи

	Факторен анализ	K-means клъстеризация	Анализ на главните компоненти	Случайна гора
Област	Статистика за изследвания	Машинно обучение	Машинно обучение	Машинно обучение
Семейство	Process / pipeline	Machine learning	Machine learning	Machine learning
Година на възникване	1931	1967 (formalized 1982)	2002	2001
Създател	Louis Leon Thurstone	MacQueen, J. B.; Lloyd, S. P.	Jolliffe, I.T. (textbook); Pearson & Hotelling (origins)	Breiman, L.
Тип	Method	Partitional clustering	Unsupervised dimensionality reduction	Ensemble (bagging of decision trees)
Основополагащ източник	Thurstone, L. L. (1947). Multiple Factor Analysis. University of Chicago Press.	Lloyd, S. P. (1982). Least squares quantization in PCM. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28(2), 129–137.	Jolliffe, I.T. (2002). Principal Component Analysis (2nd ed.). Springer.	Breiman, L. (2001). Random Forests. Machine Learning, 45, 5–32.
Други названия	EFA, CFA, latent variable modeling	k-means clustering, Lloyd's algorithm, k-means partitioning, hard k-means	Temel Bileşenler Analizi (PCA), PCA, principal components analysis, Karhunen-Loève transform	Rastgele Orman (Random Forest), rastgele orman, random decision forest, bagged tree ensemble
Свързани	3	4	3	4
Резюме	Factor analysis is a statistical technique for identifying latent (unobserved) dimensions underlying observed variables, developed by Louis Leon Thurstone in the 1930s and formalized by Jöreskog (1969). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) discovers unknown factor structure from data; confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tests hypothesized relationships between observed and latent variables. Essential in psychometrics (test development), organizational research (measuring constructs like leadership style), and biomedicine (identifying disease subtypes), factor analysis reduces dimensionality while revealing conceptual organization in multivariate data.	K-means is a classic unsupervised partitional clustering algorithm that divides a dataset into K non-overlapping groups by iteratively assigning each observation to its nearest centroid and updating centroids as the mean of their assigned points. It is one of the most widely used exploratory tools in machine learning and data analysis.	Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is an unsupervised dimensionality-reduction method — given its modern textbook treatment by Ian Jolliffe (2002) — that compresses high-dimensional data into fewer dimensions while preserving the maximum possible variance. It re-expresses correlated variables as a small set of uncorrelated principal components ordered by how much of the data's variation each one captures.	Random Forest is an ensemble learning method, introduced by Leo Breiman in 2001, that grows many decision trees on bootstrap samples of the data and combines their votes to produce strong classification and regression. By pooling many slightly different trees, it produces more accurate and more stable predictions than any single tree.