Differences between fa() and factanal() functions in R

Question

I'm performing an exploratory factor analysis on my dataset, composed of 23 variables (which are questions asked to people). I got 1777 observations for these variables and I would like to investigate the latent factors that can explain these variables. Therefore, I used first the function fa() and then I tried with the function factanal() which doesn't give the same results for which I have difficulties to interpret.

Does anyone can explain me the differences between fa() and factanal() functions please?

Answer 1

Actually, after analysing the help in R, I found the main differences which are:

factanal performs a maximum-likelihood factor analysis on a covariance matrix or a data matrix while fa() function is a more general function in the sense that it proposes different fit methods such as Ordinary least square regressions (OLR). fa() also permits to draw a Factor Analysis diagram in order to retrieve visually which factors explain which variables with the different loadings showed.

In conclusion, I would say that fa() permits more flexibility than factanal()