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	Analisi Fattoriale Esplorativa (AFE)	Confirmatory factor analysis	Analisi delle Componenti Principali	Modellazione di equazioni strutturali (SEM)
Campo	Statistica	Psicometria	Apprendimento automatico	Statistica
Famiglia	Latent structure	Latent structure	Machine learning	Latent structure
Anno di origine	—	1969	2002	1970
Ideatore	—	Karl Gustav Jöreskog	Jolliffe, I.T. (textbook); Pearson & Hotelling (origins)	Karl Jöreskog (LISREL framework, 1970s)
Tipo	Latent variable / dimension reduction	Hypothesis-testing latent variable model	Unsupervised dimensionality reduction	Latent variable / causal modeling
Fonte seminale	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.	Jöreskog, K. G. (1969). A general approach to confirmatory maximum likelihood factor analysis. Psychometrika, 34(2), 183–202.	Jolliffe, I.T. (2002). Principal Component Analysis (2nd ed.). Springer.	Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J. & Anderson, R. E. (2019). Multivariate Data Analysis (8th ed.). Cengage Learning. ISBN: 978-1473756540
Alias	common factor analysis, açımlayıcı faktör analizi, factor analysis	CFA, confirmatory FA, measurement model, restricted factor analysis	Temel Bileşenler Analizi (PCA), PCA, principal components analysis, Karhunen-Loève transform	Yapısal Eşitlik Modellemesi (SEM), structural equation modelling, covariance structure analysis, latent variable modeling
Correlati	4	4	3	5
Sintesi	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.	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.	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.	Structural equation modeling is a multivariate statistical framework that simultaneously estimates a measurement model — relating observed indicators to latent constructs — and a structural model specifying directional or reciprocal relationships among those constructs. Rooted in the LISREL tradition developed by Karl Jöreskog in the 1970s, SEM is the standard tool for testing complex theoretical models in the social, behavioural, and management sciences.