[sweetdreamerit]

A question: is this much better / different than a principal component analysis (or a factor analysis)?

[antognini]

It's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison to compare SVD to PCA. SVD is a numerical technique, whereas PCA is a method to analyze a dataset. You can use SVD to perform PCA (although there are other ways to perform PCA without explicitly doing a SVD). I'm guessing that the GP performed PCA using SVD. There's a good Stack Exchange answer to exactly this question here:

http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/121162/is-there-any...

[zo7]

One way to do PCA is using SVD to find a transformation matrix of eigenvectors to project your data with, so they're similar.