[R] Help with factanal and missing values

[John Fox]

Dear Antonio, 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Antonio Prioglio [mailto:a.prioglio at city.ac.uk] 
> Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 12:50 PM
> To: John Fox
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: RE: [R] Help with factanal and missing values
> 
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, John Fox wrote:
> > 
> > Two solutions are to use na.omit() to eliminate observations with 
> > missing data -- factanal(na.omit(datamatrix), factors=n) -- 
> or to use 
> > a formula argument to factanal and pass the data as a data 
> frame via 
> > the data argument
> > -- factanal(~ var1 + ... + vark, factors=n, 
> data=as.data.frame(datamatrix)).
> 
> Thanks this was helpful and more elegant than my solution to 
> select the data with a call to complete.cases().
> 
> > 
> > By the way, what factanal() does would conventionally be 
> described as 
> > exploratory, not confirmatory, factor analysis. For the latter, you 
> > might try the sem package.
> > 
> 
> Actually these CFAs are preliminary to a Path Analysis I had 
> ambitions to do with the sem package rather than LISREL.
> 
> Could you give an example on how to do CFA with sem?

Among the examples in ?sem is a second-order CFA.

Regards,
 John