Varimax Rotation Formula

Varimax Rotation

Varimax rotation is the most common of the rotations that are available. This first involves scaling the loadings. We will scale the loadings by dividing them by the corresponding communality as shown below:

Here the loading of the i^th variable on the j^th factor after rotation, where  is the communality for variable i. What we want to do is to find the rotation which maximizes this quantity.

The Varimax procedure, as defined below, selects the rotation to find this maximum quantity:

This is the sample variances of the standardized loadings for each factor, summed over the mfactors. Objective is to find a factor rotation that maximizes this variance.