Reassessment of innovative methods to determine the number of factors: A simulation-based comparison of exploratory graph analysis and next eigenvalue sufficiency test.

Abstract

Next Eigenvalue Sufficiency Test (NEST; Achim, 2017) is a recently proposed method to determine the number of factors in exploratory factor analysis (EFA). NEST sequentially tests the null-hypothesis that k factors are sufficient to model correlations among observed variables. Another recent approach to detect factors is exploratory graph analysis (EGA; Golino & Epskamp, 2017), which rules the number of factors equal to the number of nonoverlapping communities in a graphical network model of observed correlations. We applied NEST and EGA to data sets under simulated factor models with known numbers of factors and scored their accuracy in retrieving this number. Specifically, we aimed to investigate the effects of cross-loadings on the performance of NEST and EGA. In the first study, we show that NEST and EGA performed less accurately in the presence of cross-loadings on two factors compared with factor models without cross-loadings: We observed that EGA was more sensitive to cross-loadings than NEST. In the second study, we compared NEST and EGA under simulated circumplex models in which variables showed cross-loadings on two factors. Study 2 magnified the differences between NEST and EGA in that NEST was generally able to detect factors in circumplex models while EGA preferred solutions that did not match the factors in circumplex models. In total, our studies indicate that the assumed correspondence between factors and nonoverlapping communities does not hold in the presence of substantial cross-loadings. We conclude that NEST is more in line with the concept of factors in factor models than EGA. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).