مقایسهٔ روش‌ها

	تحلیل عاملی تأییدی (CFA)	تحلیل عاملی اکتشافی (EFA)	تحلیل مؤلفه‌های اصلی
حوزه	روان‌سنجی	آمار	یادگیری ماشین
خانواده	Latent structure	Latent structure	Machine learning
سال پیدایش	1969	—	2002
پدیدآور	Karl Gustav Jöreskog	—	Jolliffe, I.T. (textbook); Pearson & Hotelling (origins)
نوع	Hypothesis-testing latent variable model	Latent variable / dimension reduction	Unsupervised dimensionality reduction
منبع بنیادین	Jöreskog, K. G. (1969). A general approach to confirmatory maximum likelihood factor analysis. Psychometrika, 34(2), 183–202.	Fabrigar, L. R., Wegener, D. T., MacCallum, R. C. & Strahan, E. J. (1999). Evaluating the use of exploratory factor analysis in psychological research. Psychological Methods, 4(3), 272–299.	Jolliffe, I.T. (2002). Principal Component Analysis (2nd ed.). Springer.
نام‌های دیگر	CFA, confirmatory FA, measurement model, restricted factor analysis	common factor analysis, açımlayıcı faktör analizi, factor analysis	Temel Bileşenler Analizi (PCA), PCA, principal components analysis, Karhunen-Loève transform
مرتبط	4	4	3
خلاصه	Confirmatory factor analysis tests a researcher-specified factor structure against observed data. Unlike exploratory approaches, the researcher decides in advance which indicators load on which latent factor, and the model is evaluated by how closely the implied covariance matrix reproduces the sample covariance matrix. CFA is central to scale validation, construct validity assessment, and measurement invariance testing.	Exploratory factor analysis reduces a large set of observed variables into a smaller number of latent common factors. It is widely used in scale development and psychometrics to uncover the dimensional structure that underlies a set of correlated items, without specifying that structure in advance.	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.