CAN PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS PRESERVE THE SPARSITY IN FACTOR LOADINGS?
主成分分析能否保留因子载荷的稀疏性?
This article studies the principal component analysis (PCA) estimation of weak factor models with sparse loadings. We uncover an intrinsic near-sparsity preservation property for the PCA estimators of loadings, which comes from the approximately (block) upper triangular structure of the rotation matrix. It suggests an asymmetric relationship among factors: the sparsity of the rotated loadings for a stronger factor can be contaminated by the loadings from weaker ones, but the…