Using Pratt's Importance Measures in Confirmatory Factor Analyses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When running a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), users specify and interpret the pattern (loading) matrix. It has been recommended that the structure coefficients, indicating the factors’ correlation with the observed indicators, should also be reported when the factors are correlated (Graham, Guthrie, & Thompson, 2003; Thompson, 1997). The aims of this article are: (1) to note the structure coefficient should be interpreted with caution if the factors are specified to correlate. Because the structure coefficient is a zero-order correlation, it may be partially or entirely a reflection of factor correlations. This is elucidated by the matrix algebra of the structure coefficients based on the example in Graham et al. (2003). (2) The second aim is to introduce the method of Pratt’s (1987) importance measures to be used in a CFA. The method uses the information in the structure coefficients, along with the pattern coefficients, into unique measures that are not confounded by the factor correlations. These importance measures indicate the proportions of the variation in an observed indicator that are attributable to the factors – an interpretation analogous to the effect size measure of eta-squared. The importance measures can further be transformed to eta correlations, a measure of unique directional correlation of a factor with an observed indicator. This is illustrated with a real data example.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it