Conduct quantile regression with several dependent variables in R - r

I'm interested in doing a multivariate regression in R, looking at the effects of a grouping variable (2 levels) on several dependent variables. However, due to my data being non-normal and the 2 groups not having homogenous variances, I'm looking to use a quantile regression instead. I'm using the rq function from the quantreg toolbox to do this.
My code is as follows
# Generate some fake data
DV = matrix(rnorm(40*5),ncol=5) #construct matrix for dependent variables
IV = matrix(rep(1:2,20)) #matrix for grouping factor
library(quantreg)
model.q = rq(DV~IV,
tau = 0.5)
I get the following error message when this is run:
Error in y - x %*% z$coef : non-conformable arrays
In addition: Warning message:
In rq.fit.br(x, y, tau = tau, ...) : Solution may be nonunique
I believe this is due to my having several DVs, as the model works fine when I try using a DV of one column. Is there a specific way I should be formatting my data? Or perhaps there is another function I may be able to use?
Thank you!

If you just want to run several regressions, each with the same set of independent variables, but with a different dependent variable, you could write a function and then apply it to all columns of your DV matrix and save the models in a list:
reg <- function(col_number) {
model.q <- rq(DV[, col_number] ~ IV, tau = 0.5)
}
model_list <- lapply(1:ncol(DV), reg)
However, as pointed out in the comments, it might be that you want a multivariate model accounting for the correlation of the outcome - but then I do not think the rq method would be appropriate

If you have multiple responses, what you most likely need is:
DV = matrix(rnorm(40*5),ncol=5) #construct matrix for dependent variables
IV = matrix(rep(1:2,20)) #matrix for grouping factor
library(quantreg)
rqs.fit(x=IV, y=DV, tau=0.5, tol = 0.0001)
Unfortunately, there's really not a lot of documentation about how this works.. I can update if i do find it

Related

How to run Beta Regression with lots of independent variables?

Why is it that Beta Regression that is bound between 0 and 1 is unable to handle lots of independent variables as Regressors? I have around 30 independent variables that I am trying to fit and it shows error like:
Error in optim(par = start, fn = loglikfun, gr = gradfun, method =
method, : non-finite value supplied by optim
Only few variables it is accepting.Now If I combine all these independent variables in X <- (df$x1 + … + df$x30) and make dependent variable in Y <- df$y and then run Beta Regression then it works but I won’t be getting coefficients for individual independent variables which I want.
betareg(Y ~ X, data = df)
So, what’s the solution?
Probably, the model did not converge because of the multicollinearity problem. In most cases, regression models can not be estimated properly when lots of variables are considered. You can overcome this problem with an appropriate variable selection procedure using information criteria.
You can benefit gamlss package in R. Also, stepGAIC() function can help you when considering gamlss(...,family=BE) function during the modeling.

Model Syntax for Simple Moderation Model in Lavaan (with bootstrapping)

I am a social scientist currently running a simple moderation model in R, in the form of y ~ x + m + m * x. My moderator is a binary categorical variable (two separate groups).
I started out with lm(), bootstrapped estimates with boot() and obtained bca confidence intervals with boot.ci. Since there is no automated way of doing this for all parameters (at my coding level at least), this is bit tedious. Howver, I now saw that the lavaan package offer bootstrapping as part of the regular sem() function, and also bca CIs as part of parameterEstimates(). So, I was wondering (since I am using lavaan in other analyses) whether I could just replace lm() with lavaan for the sake of keeping my work more consistent.
Doing this, I was wondering about what the equivalent model for lavaan would be to test for moderation in the same way. I saw this post where Jeremy Miles proposes the code below, which I follow mostly.
mod.1 <- "
y ~ c(a, b) * x
y ~~ c(v1, v1) * y # This step needed for exact equivalence
y ~ c(int1, int2) * 1
modEff := a - b
mEff := int1 - int2"
But it would be great if you could help me figure out some final things.
1) What does the y ~~ c(v1, v1) * y part mean and and why is it needed for "exact equivalence" to the lm model? From the output it seems this constrics variances of the outcome for both groups to the same value?
2) From the post, am I right to understand that either including the interaction effect as calculated above OR constraining (only) the slope between models and looking at model fit with anova()would be the same test for moderation?
3) The lavaan page says that adding test = "bootstrap" to the sem() function allows for boostrap adjusted p-values. However, I read a lot about p-values conflicting with the bca-CIs at times, and this has happened to me. Searching around, I understand that this conflict comes from the assumptions for the distribution of the data under the H0 for p-values, but not for CIs (which just give the range of most likely values). I was therefore wondering what it exactly means that the p-values given here are "bootstrap-adjusted"? Is it technically more true to report these for my SEM models than the CIs?
Many questions, but I would be very grateful for any help you can provide.
Best,
Alex
I think I can answer at least Nr. 1 and 2 of your questions but it is probably easier to not use SEM and instead program a function that conveniently gives you CIs for all coefficients of your model.
So first, to answer your questions:
What is proposed in the code you gave is called multigroup comparison. Essentially this means that you fit the same SEM to two different groups of cases in your dataset. It is equivalent to a moderated regression with binary moderator because in both cases you get two slopes (often called „simple slopes“) for the scalar predictor, one slope per group of the moderator.
Now, in your lavaan code you only see the scalar predictor x. The binary moderator is implied by group="m" when you fit the model with fit.1 <- sem(mod.1, data = df, group = "m") (took this from the page you linked).
The two-element vectors (c( , )) in the lavaan code specify named parameters for the first and second group, respectively. By y ~~ c(v1, v1) * y , the residual variances of y are set equal in both groups because they have the same name. In contrast, the slopes c(a, b) and the intercepts c(int1, int2) are allowed to vary between groups.
Yes. If you use the SEM, you would fit the model a second time adding a == b and compare the model this to the first version where the slopes can differ. This is the same as comparing lm() models with and without a:b (or a*b) in the formula.
Here I cannot provide a direct answer to your question. I suspect if you want BCa CIs as you would get from applying boot.ci to an lm model fit, this might not be implemented. In the lavaan documentation BCa confidence intervals are only mentioned once: In the section about the parameterEstimates function, which can also perform bootstrap (see p. 89). However, it does not produce actual BCa (bias-corrected and accelerated) CIs but only bias-corrected ones.
As mentioned above, I guess the simplest solution would be to use lm() and either repeat the boot.ci procedure for each coefficient or write a wrapper function that does this for you. I suggest this also because a reviewer may be quite puzzled to see you do multigroup SEM instead of a simple moderated regression, which is much more common.
You probably did something like this already:
lm_fit <- function(dat, idx) coef( lm(y ~ x*m, data=dat[idx, ]) )
bs_out <- boot::boot(mydata, statistic=lm_fit, R=1000)
ci_out <- boot::boot.ci(bs_out, conf=.95, type="bca", index=1)
Now, either you repeat the last line for each coefficient, i.e., varying index from 1 to 4. Or you get fancy and let R do the repeating with a function like this:
all_ci <- function(bs) {
est <- bs$t0
lower <- vector("numeric", length(bs$t0))
upper <- lower
for (i in 1:length(bs$t0)) {
ci <- tail(boot::boot.ci(bs, type="bca", index=i)$bca[1,], 2)
lower[i] <- ci[1]
upper[i] <- ci[2]
}
cbind(est, lower, upper)
}
all_ci(bs_out)
I am sure this could be written more concisely but it should work fine for bootstraps of simple lm() models.

Removing variables resulting in singular matrix in R regression model

I've been using mnlogit in R to generate a multivariable logistic regression model. My original set of variables generated a singular matrix error, i.e.
Error in solve.default(hessian, gradient, tol = 1e-24) :
system is computationally singular: reciprocal condition number = 7.09808e-25
It turns out that several "sparse" columns (variables that are 0 for most sampled individuals) cause this singularity error. I need a systematic way of removing those variables that lead to a singularity error while retaining those that allow estimation of a regression model, i.e. something analogous to the use of the function step to select variables minimizing AIC via stepwise addition, but this time removing variables that generate singular matrices.
Is there some way to do this, since checking each variable by hand (there are several hundred predictor variables) would be incredibly tedious?
If X is the design matrix from your model which you can obtain using
X <- model.matrix(formula, data = data)
then you can find a (non-unique) set of variables that would give you a non-singular model using the QR decomposition. For example,
x <- 1:3
X <- model.matrix(~ x + I(x^2) + I(x^3))
QR <- qr(crossprod(X)) # Get the QR decomposition
vars <- QR$pivot[seq_len(QR$rank)] # Variable numbers
names <- rownames(QR$qr)[vars] # Variable names
names
#> [1] "(Intercept)" "x" "I(x^2)"
This is subject to numerical error and may not agree with whatever code you are using, for two reasons.
First, it doesn't do any weighting, whereas logistic regression normally uses iteratively reweighted regression.
Second, it might not use the same tolerance as the other code. You can change its sensitivity by changing the tol parameter to qr() from the default 1e-07. Bigger values will cause more variables to be omitted from names.

How can I extract coefficients from this model in caret?

I'm using the caret package with the leaps package to get the number of variables to use in a linear regression. How do I extract the model with the lowest RMSE that uses mdl$bestTune number of variables? If this can't be done are there functions in other packages you would recommend that allow for loocv of a stepwise linear regression and actually allow me to find the final model?
Below is reproducible code. From it, I can tell from mdl$bestTune that the number of variables should be 4 (even though I would have hoped for 3). It seems like I should be able to extract the variables from the third row of summary(mdl$finalModel) but I'm not sure how I would do this in a general case and not just this example.
library(caret)
set.seed(101)
x <- matrix(rnorm(36*5), nrow=36)
colnames(x) <- paste0("V", 1:5)
y <- 0.2*x[,1] + 0.3*x[,3] + 0.5*x[,4] + rnorm(36) * .0001
train.control <- trainControl(method="LOOCV")
mdl <- train(x=x, y=y, method="leapSeq", trControl = train.control, trace=FALSE)
coef(mdl$finalModel, as.double(mdl$bestTune))
mdl$bestTune
summary(mdl$finalModel)
mdl$results
Here's the context behind my question in case it's of interest. I have historical monthly returns hundreds of mutual fund. Each fund's returns will be a dependent variable that I'd like to regress against a set of returns on a handful (e.g. 5) factors. For each fund I want to run a stepwise regression. I expect only 1 to 3 of the five factors to be significant for any fund.
you can use:
coef(mdl$finalModel,unlist(mdl$bestTune))

R: glmrob can't predict models with dropped co-linear columns, while glm can?

I'm learning to implement robust glms in R, but can't figure out why I am unable to get glmrob to predict values from my regression models when I have a model where some columns are dropped due to co-linearity. Specifically when I use the predict function to predict values from a glmrob, it always gives NA for all values. I don't observe this when predicting values from the same data & model using glm. It doesn't seem to matter what data I use -- as long as there is a NA coefficient in the fitted model (and the NA isn't the last coefficient in the coefficient vector), the predict does not work.
This behavior holds for all datasets and models I have tried where an internal column is dropped due to co-linearity. I include a fake data set where two columns are dropped from the model, which gives two NAs in the coefficient list. Both glm and glmrob give nearly identical coefficients, yet predict only works with the glm model. So my question is: what don't I understand about robust regression that would prevent my glmrob models from generating predicted values?
library(robustbase)
#Make fake data with two categorial predictors
df <- data.frame("category" = rep(c("A","B","C"),each=6))
df$location <- rep(1:6,each=3)
val <- rep(c(500,50,5000),each=6)+rep(c(50,100,25,200,100,1),each=3)
df$value <- rpois(NROW(df),val)
#note that predict works if we omit the newdata parameter. However I need the newdata param
#so I use the original dataframe here as a stand-in.
mod <- glm(val ~ category + as.factor(location), data=df, family=poisson)
predict(mod, newdata=df) # works fine
mod <- glmrob(val ~ category + as.factor(location), data=df, family=poisson)
predict(mod, newdata=df) #predicts NA for all values
I've been digging into this and have concluded that the problem does not lie in my understanding of robust regression, but rather the problem lies with a bug in the robustbase package. The predict.lmrob function does not correctly pick the necessary coefficients from the model before the prediction. It needs to pick the first x non-NA coefficients (where x=rank of the model matrix). Instead it merely picks the first x coefficients without checking if they are NA. This explains why this problem only surfaces for models where the NA isn't the last coefficient in the coefficient vector.
To fix this, I copied the predict.lmrob source using:
getAnywhere(predict.lmrob)
and created my own replacement function. In this function I made a single modification to the code:
...
p <- object$rank
if (is.null(p)) {
df <- Inf
p <- sum(!is.na(coef(object)))
#piv <- seq_len(p) # old code
piv <- which(!is.na(coef(object))) # new code
}
else {
p1 <- seq_len(p)
piv <- if (p)
qr(object)$pivot[p1]
}
...
I've run a few hundred datasets using this change and it has worked well.

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