| Abstract: | Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used statistical technique for determining subscales in questionnaire data. As in any other statistical technique, missing data may both complicate its execution and interpretation. In this study, six methods for dealing with missing data in the context of PCA are reviewed and compared: listwise deletion (LD), pairwise deletion, the missing data passive approach, regularized PCA, the expectation-maximization algorithm, and multiple imputation. Simulations show that except for LD, all methods give about equally good results for realistic percentages of missing data. Therefore, the choice of a procedure can be based on the ease of application or purely the convenience of availability of a technique. |
