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:
,
is the
outcome variable and
is the
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
is:
The covariance matrix can be obtained with some handy matrix operations:
given that
The standard errors of the coefficients are basically 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:
– for the full model with all predictors
– for the partial model (
) with the outcome observed mean as estimated outcome
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.
Hope this was useful and worth your time!