OptimalFactor: Item Selection in Factor Analysis by Boosting and Specification Search
Provides an iterative optimization algorithm for exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis that follows a boosting approach inspired by machine learning. It uses a composite fit index whose weights adapt to the degrees of freedom and the sample size, following Kenny and McCoach (2003) <doi:10.1207/S15328007SEM1003_1> and Shi, Lee and Maydeu-Olivares (2019) <doi:10.1177/0013164418783530>. It detects and removes problematic items (Heywood cases, cross-loadings, low loadings) with greedy or global search strategies, checks interfactor correlations, and supports ordinal data with WLSMV estimation and several rotation methods. A heuristic specification search for confirmatory models (MacCallum, 1986 <doi:10.1037/0033-2909.100.1.107>) explores move, drop and covariance operations across seed configurations. It also evaluates the resampling stability of the item selection, the recovery of a known or theoretical structure, and offers an optional conceptual analysis of removed items through a large language model service.
| Version: | 1.5.0 |
| Depends: | R (≥ 4.0.0) |
| Imports: | lavaan, psych, dplyr, tidyr, ggplot2, stringr, parallel, stats, utils |
| Suggests: | testthat (≥ 3.0.0), httr, jsonlite, R.utils, knitr, rmarkdown, semTools |
| Published: | 2026-10-24 |
| DOI: | 10.32614/CRAN.package.OptimalFactor (may not be active yet) |
| Author: | Jose Ventura-Leon 
[aut, cre] |
| Maintainer: | Jose Ventura-Leon <jventuraleon at gmail.com> |
| BugReports: | https://github.com/jventural/OptimalFactor/issues |
| License: | GPL (≥ 3) |
| URL: | https://github.com/jventural/OptimalFactor, https://jventural.github.io/OptimalFactor/ |
| NeedsCompilation: | no |
| Materials: | README, NEWS |
| CRAN checks: | OptimalFactor results |
Documentation:
| Reference manual: | OptimalFactor.html , OptimalFactor.pdf |
| Vignettes: |
Introduction to OptimalFactor (source, R code) EFA-Boosting Algorithm (source, R code) |
Downloads:
| Package source: | OptimalFactor_1.5.0.tar.gz |
| Windows binaries: | r-devel: not available, r-release: not available, r-oldrel: not available |
| macOS binaries: | r-release (arm64): not available, r-oldrel (arm64): not available, r-release (x86_64): not available, r-oldrel (x86_64): not available |
Linking:
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