Item Selection in Factor Analysis by Boosting and Specification Search

Provides an iterative optimization algorithm for exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis that follows a boosting approach inspired by machine learning. It uses a composite fit index whose weights adapt to the degrees of freedom and the sample size, following Kenny and McCoach (2003) and Shi, Lee and Maydeu-Olivares (2019) . It detects and removes problematic items (Heywood cases, cross-loadings, low loadings) with greedy or global search strategies, checks interfactor correlations, and supports ordinal data with WLSMV estimation and several rotation methods. A heuristic specification search for confirmatory models (MacCallum, 1986 ) explores move, drop and covariance operations across seed configurations. It also evaluates the resampling stability of the item selection, the recovery of a known or theoretical structure, and offers an optional conceptual analysis of removed items through a large language model service.