Factor analysis is a statistical

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 method used to describe variability

Variance

In probability theory and statistics, the variance is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out. It is one of several descriptors of a probability distribution, describing how far the numbers lie from the mean . In particular, the variance is one of the moments of a distribution...

 among observed, correlated variables

Variable (mathematics)

In mathematics, a variable is a value that may change within the scope of a given problem or set of operations. In contrast, a constant is a value that remains unchanged, though often unknown or undetermined. The concepts of constants and variables are fundamental to many areas of mathematics and...

 in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved, uncorrelated variables called factors. In other words, it is possible, for example, that variations in three or four observed variables mainly reflect the variations in fewer such unobserved variables. Factor analysis searches for such joint variations in response to unobserved latent variable

Latent variable

In statistics, latent variables , are variables that are not directly observed but are rather inferred from other variables that are observed . Mathematical models that aim to explain observed variables in terms of latent variables are called latent variable models...

s.