Hi. It seems that nearly every time I try to use factanal I get the following response:
>faa2db1<-factanal(mretdb1,factors=2,method="mle",control=list(nstart=25)) Error in factanal(mretdb1, factors = 2, method = "mle", control = list(nstart = 25)) : unable to optimize from these starting value(s) > In the case cited above, mretdb1 is synthetic data created from two factors, that is, mretdb1 has dimensions 3050*1000, and each of the thousand columns has the form c[i]=a1[i]*f1 + a2[i]*f2 + a3[i]*fn[,i] where a1, a2, a3 are each vectors of length 1000, f1 and f2 are vectors of length 3050, and fn is a matrix of dimension 3050*1000, such that f1, f2, and all the columns of fn are mutually uncorrelated. I wanted to see how closely the factors returned by factanal are to the ones that generated the data. But, as you can see, factanal hasn't cooperated! I would greatly appreciate advice from factanal users, especially those who have experienced the same error. Thanks! -- TMK -- 917-656-5351 cell 212-460-5430 home ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.