Returning the p-value of a factor analysis

Does anyone know how to explicitly refer to the p-value of thet test that
the chosen number of factors is significant in a factor analysis.
It's not in the list of values for the factanal command output yet it is
printed out with the results.

Right, so look at the code to compute it in print.factanal and write a 
small function to extract the value you want from the object.
Something like

Pval.factanal <- function(x)
{
    p <- nrow(x$loadings); factors <- x$factors
    if(!is.na(x$n.obs) && x$dof > 0) {
        dof <- x$dof
        stat <- (x$n.obs - 1 - (2 * p + 5)/6 -
                 (2 * factors)/3) * x$criteria["objective"]
        pchisq(stat, dof, lower.tail = FALSE)
    } else NA
}

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Wayne Jones <JonesW at kssg.com> writes:

Hi there, 

Does anyone know how to explicitly refer to the p-value of thet test that
the chosen number of factors is significant in a factor analysis.
It's not in the list of values for the factanal command output yet it is
printed out with the results.

Thanks in advance.

It's calculated when printed. This is somewhat in bad style (according
to my tastes at least), but we have that happening in a few places. So
you need to redo the computations, which can be found inside
print.factanal. In 1.7.0, this function is hidden in the mva namespace
but you can view it with get("print.factanal",environment(factanal)).

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

Peter Dalgaard BSA <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> writes:

In 1.7.0, this function is hidden in the mva namespace
but you can view it with get("print.factanal",environment(factanal)).

On closer thought, that should probably be

getS3method("print","factanal")

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907