From pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca  Fri Jan 21 21:48:29 2005
From: pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca (Paul Gilbert)
Date: Fri Jan 21 21:50:32 2005
Subject: [Rd] GPArotation
Message-ID: <41F16A9D.3070005@bank-banque-canada.ca>

I released a new package called GPArotation in the devel area of CRAN. 
This package uses the gradient projection algorithm of Bernaards and 
Jennrich <http://www.stat.ucla.edu/research/gpa> to do factor rotation.  
The R package is based on code from their web site. Available rotation 
objective criteria  are "oblimin", "quartimin", "target", "pst", 
"oblimax", "entropy",  "quartimax", "varimax", "simplimax", "bentler", 
"tandemI", "tandemII", "geomin", "cf", "infomax" and "mccammon".

I have done a certain amount of testing of "oblimin" and it appears to 
work well.  More extensive testing of all criteria and comparisons with 
known results would be very much appreciated. Beware that the default is 
not to do Kaiser normalization, which often is the default for 
commercial implementations of some of these criteria (but it does not 
make sense for others).

In  superficial testing of some of the criteria I have found that the 
loadings matrix appears to stabilize in the sense that it does not 
change when the number of iterations is increased, but the gradient 
based convergence criterion does not signal convergence. I suspect this 
is because the gradient is large even in close proximity to the optimum. 
As many of you are much more familiar with this problem than I am,  I 
would certainly appreciate suggestions for better convergence tests.

Paul Gilbert


[Rd] GPArotation
Paul Gilbert