# Linear Algebra behind the lm() function in R

This post comes out of the blue, nearly 2 years since my last one. I realize I’ve been lazy, so here’s hoping I move from an inertia of rest to that of motion, implying, regular and (hopefully) relevant posts. I also chanced upon some wisdom while scrolling through my Twitter feed:

This blog post in particular was meant to be a reminder to myself and other R users that the much used lm() function in R (for fitting linear models) can be replaced with some handy matrix operations to obtain regression coefficients, their standard errors and other goodness-of-fit stats printed out when summary() is called on an lm object.

Linear regression can be formulated mathematically as follows:
$\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{X} \mathbf{\beta} + \mathbf{\epsilon}$,
$\mathbf{\epsilon} \sim N(0, \sigma^2 \mathbf{I})$

$\mathbf{y}$ is the $\mathbf{n}\times \mathbf{1}$ outcome variable and $\mathbf{X}$ is the $\mathbf{n}\times \mathbf{(\mathbf{k}+1)}$ data matrix of independent predictor variables (including a vector of ones corresponding to the intercept). The ordinary least squares (OLS) estimate for the vector of coefficients $\mathbf{\beta}$ is:

$\hat{\mathbf{\beta}} = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{y}$

The covariance matrix can be obtained with some handy matrix operations:
$\textrm{Var}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \;\sigma^2 \mathbf{I} \; \mathbf{X} (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}$
given that $\textrm{Var}(AX) = A \times \textrm{Var}X \times A^{\prime}; \textrm{Var}(\mathbf{y}) = \mathbf{\sigma^2}$

The standard errors of the coefficients are basically $\textrm{Diag}(\sqrt{\textrm{Var}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}})}) = \textrm{Diag}(\sqrt{\sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}})$ and with these, one can compute the t-statistics and their corresponding p-values.

Lastly, the F-statistic and its corresponding p-value can be calculated after computing the two residual sum of squares (RSS) statistics:

• $\mathbf{RSS}$ – for the full model with all predictors
• $\mathbf{RSS_0}$ – for the partial model ($\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{\mu} + \mathbf{\nu}; \mathbf{\mu} = \mathop{\mathbb{E}}[\mathbf{y}]; \mathbf{\nu} \sim N(0, \sigma_0^2 \mathbf{I})$) with the outcome observed mean as estimated outcome

$\mathbf{F} = \frac{(\mathbf{RSS_0}-\mathbf{RSS})/\mathbf{k}}{\mathbf{RSS}/(\mathbf{n}-\mathbf{k}-1)}$

I wrote some R code to construct the output from summarizing lm objects, using all the math spewed thus far. The data used for this exercise is available in R, and comprises of standardized fertility measures and socio-economic indicators for each of 47 French-speaking provinces of Switzerland from 1888. Try it out and see for yourself the linear algebra behind linear regression.

 ### Linear Regression Using lm() ---------------------------------------- data("swiss") dat <- swiss linear_model <- lm(Fertility ~ ., data = dat) summary(linear_model) # Call: # lm(formula = Fertility ~ ., data = dat) # # Residuals: # Min 1Q Median 3Q Max # -15.2743 -5.2617 0.5032 4.1198 15.3213 # # Coefficients: # Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) # (Intercept) 66.91518 10.70604 6.250 1.91e-07 *** # Agriculture -0.17211 0.07030 -2.448 0.01873 * # Examination -0.25801 0.25388 -1.016 0.31546 # Education -0.87094 0.18303 -4.758 2.43e-05 *** # Catholic 0.10412 0.03526 2.953 0.00519 ** # Infant.Mortality 1.07705 0.38172 2.822 0.00734 ** # --- # Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 # # Residual standard error: 7.165 on 41 degrees of freedom # Multiple R-squared: 0.7067, Adjusted R-squared: 0.671 # F-statistic: 19.76 on 5 and 41 DF, p-value: 5.594e-10 ### Using Linear Algebra ------------------------------------------------ y <- matrix(dat$Fertility, nrow = nrow(dat)) X <- cbind(1, as.matrix(x = dat[,-1])) colnames(X)[1] <- "(Intercept)" # N x k matrix N <- nrow(X) k <- ncol(X) - 1 # number of predictor variables (ergo, excluding Intercept column) # Estimated Regression Coefficients beta_hat <- solve(t(X)%*%X)%*%(t(X)%*%y) # Variance of outcome variable = Variance of residuals sigma_sq <- residual_variance <- (N-k-1)^-1 * sum((y - X %*% beta_hat)^2) residual_std_error <- sqrt(residual_variance) # Variance and Std. Error of estimated coefficients of the linear model var_betaHat <- sigma_sq * solve(t(X) %*% X) coeff_std_errors <- sqrt(diag(var_betaHat)) # t values of estimates are ratio of estimated coefficients to std. errors t_values <- beta_hat / coeff_std_errors # p-values of t-statistics of estimated coefficeints p_values_tstat <- 2 * pt(abs(t_values), N-k, lower.tail = FALSE) # assigning R's significance codes to obtained p-values signif_codes_match <- function(x){ ifelse(x <= 0.001,"***", ifelse(x <= 0.01,"**", ifelse(x < 0.05,"*", ifelse(x < 0.1,"."," ")))) } signif_codes <- sapply(p_values_tstat, signif_codes_match) # R-squared and Adjusted R-squared (refer any econometrics / statistics textbook) R_sq <- 1 - (N-k-1)*residual_variance / (N*mean((y - mean(y))^2)) R_sq_adj <- 1 - residual_variance / ((N/(N-1))*mean((y - mean(y))^2)) # Residual sum of squares (RSS) for the full model RSS <- (N-k-1)*residual_variance # RSS for the partial model with only intercept (equal to mean), ergo, TSS RSS0 <- TSS <- sum((y - mean(y))^2) # F statistic based on RSS for full and partial models # k = degress of freedom of partial model # N - k - 1 = degress of freedom of full model F_stat <- ((RSS0 - RSS)/k) / (RSS/(N-k-1)) # p-values of the F statistic p_value_F_stat <- pf(F_stat, df1 = k, df2 = N-k-1, lower.tail = FALSE) # stitch the main results toghether lm_results <- as.data.frame(cbind(beta_hat, coeff_std_errors, t_values, p_values_tstat, signif_codes)) colnames(lm_results) <- c("Estimate","Std. Error","t value","Pr(>|t|)","") ### Print out results of all relevant calcualtions ----------------------- print(lm_results) cat("Residual standard error: ", round(residual_std_error, digits = 3), " on ",N-k-1," degrees of freedom", "\nMultiple R-squared: ",R_sq," Adjusted R-squared: ",R_sq_adj, "\nF-statistic: ",F_stat, " on ",k-1," and ",N-k-1, " DF, p-value: ", p_value_F_stat,"\n") # Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) # (Intercept) 66.9151816789654 10.7060375853301 6.25022854119771 1.73336561301153e-07 *** # Agriculture -0.172113970941457 0.0703039231786469 -2.44814177018405 0.0186186100433133 * # Examination -0.258008239834722 0.253878200892098 -1.01626779663678 0.315320687313066 # Education -0.870940062939429 0.183028601571259 -4.75849159892283 2.3228265226988e-05 *** # Catholic 0.104115330743766 0.035257852536169 2.95296858017545 0.00513556154915653 ** # Infant.Mortality 1.07704814069103 0.381719650858061 2.82156849475775 0.00726899472564356 ** # Residual standard error: 7.165 on 41 degrees of freedom # Multiple R-squared: 0.706735 Adjusted R-squared: 0.670971 # F-statistic: 19.76106 on 4 and 41 DF, p-value: 5.593799e-10 view raw lm_linear_algebra.R hosted with ❤ by GitHub Hope this was useful and worth your time! # Endogenously Detecting Structural Breaks in a Time Series: Implementation in R The most conventional approach to determine structural breaks in longitudinal data seems to be the Chow Test. From Wikipedia, The Chow test, proposed by econometrician Gregory Chow in 1960, is a test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, it is most commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break at a period which can be assumed to be known a priori (for instance, a major historical event such as a war). In program evaluation, the Chow test is often used to determine whether the independent variables have different impacts on different subgroups of the population. As shown in the figure below, regressions on the 2 sub-intervals seem to have greater explanatory power than a single regression over the data. For the data above, determining the sub-intervals is an easy task. However, things may not look that simple in reality. Conducting a Chow test for structural breaks leaves the data scientist at the mercy of his subjective gaze in choosing a null hypothesis for a break point in the data. Instead of choosing the breakpoints in an exogenous manner, what if the data itself could learn where these breakpoints lie? Such an endogenous technique is what Bai and Perron came up with in a seminal paper published in 1998 that could detect multiple structural breaks in longitudinal data. A later paper in 2003 dealt with the testing for breaks empirically, using a dynamic programming algorithm based on the Bellman principle. I will discuss a quick implementation of this technique in R. Brief Outline: Assuming you have a ts object (I don’t know whether this works with zoo, but it should) in R, called ts. Then implement the following:  # assuming you have a 'ts' object in R # 1. install package 'strucchange' # 2. Then write down this code: library(strucchange) # store the breakdates bp_ts <- breakpoints(ts ~ 1) # this will give you the break dates and their confidence intervals summary(bp_ts) # store the confidence intervals ci_ts <- confint(bp_ts) ## to plot the breakpoints with confidence intervals plot(ts) lines(bp_ts) lines(ci_ts) view raw strucchange_usage.R hosted with ❤ by GitHub An illustration I started with data on India’s rice crop productivity between 1950 (around Independence from British Colonial rule) and 2008. Here’s how it looks: You can download the excel and CSV files here and here respectively. Here’s the way to go using R:  library(xlsx) library(forecast) library(tseries) library(strucchange) ## load the data from a CSV or Excel file. This example is done with an Excel sheet. prod_df <- read.xlsx(file = 'agricultural_productivity.xls', sheetIndex = 'Sheet1', rowIndex = 8:65, colIndex = 2, header = FALSE) colnames(prod_df) <- c('Rice') ## store rice data as time series objects rice <- ts(prod_df$Rice, start=c(1951, 1), end=c(2008, 1), frequency=1) # store the breakpoints bp.rice <- breakpoints(rice ~ 1) summary(bp.rice) ## the BIC chooses 5 breakpoints; plot the graph with breakdates and their confidence intervals plot(bp.rice) plot(rice) lines(bp.rice) ## confidence intervals ci.rice <- confint(bp.rice) ci.rice lines(ci.rice)
view raw rice_strucchange.R hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Voila, this is what you get:

The dotted vertical lines indicated the break dates; the horizontal red lines indicate their confidence intervals.

This is a quick and dirty implementation. For a more detailed take, check out the documentation on the R package called strucchange.

# Statistics: The Sexiest Job of the Decade

Anyone who’s got a formal education in economics knows who Hal Varian is. He’s most popularly known for his book Intermediate Economics. He’s also the Chief Economist at Google. He is known to have famously stated more or less, that statisticians and data analysts would be the sexiest jobs of the next decade.

That has come true, to a great extent, and we’ll be seeing more.