The counter values represent the confirmation of a specific tolerance option by the available examples. Always the low values are confirmed, the range in the middle is often confirmed and very rarely values near 1.0. The counter values express the property of the tolerance option, that has just been described by "often" and "very rarely".
From counter matrices an intermediate result can be derived. A little proportion of high counter values belonging to high tolerance values indicates an important dimension. If high and low tolerance values show high counter values, this indicates an unimportant dimension.
As all tolerance options are equally confirmed initially, the FACTORFINDER-Procedure initializes the counter matrix beginning with every new candidate assigning values of 1 to every tolerance option.