Dynamic variable names in R regressions - r

Question

Being aware of the danger of using dynamic variable names, I am trying to loop over varios regression models where different variables specifications are choosen. Usually !!rlang::sym() solves this kind of problem for me just fine, but it somehow fails in regressions. A minimal example would be the following:
y= runif(1000)
x1 = runif(1000)
x2 = runif(1000)
df2= data.frame(y,x1,x2)
summary(lm(y ~ x1+x2, data=df2)) ## works
var = "x1"
summary(lm(y ~ !!rlang::sym(var)) +x2, data=df2) # gives an error
My understanding was that !!rlang::sym(var)) takes the values of var (namely x1) and puts that in the code in a way that R thinks this is a variable (not a char). BUt I seem to be wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?

Answer 1

Personally, I like to do this with some computing on the language. For me, a combination of bquote with eval is easiest (to remember).
var <- as.symbol(var)
eval(bquote(summary(lm(y ~ .(var) + x2, data = df2))))
#Call:
#lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2, data = df2)
#
#Residuals:
# Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
#-0.49298 -0.26248 -0.00046 0.24111 0.51988
#
#Coefficients:
# Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
#(Intercept) 0.50244 0.02480 20.258 <2e-16 ***
#x1 -0.01468 0.03161 -0.464 0.643
#x2 -0.01635 0.03227 -0.507 0.612
#---
#Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
#
#Residual standard error: 0.2878 on 997 degrees of freedom
#Multiple R-squared: 0.0004708, Adjusted R-squared: -0.001534
#F-statistic: 0.2348 on 2 and 997 DF, p-value: 0.7908
I find this superior to any approach that doesn't show the same call as summary(lm(y ~ x1+x2, data=df2)).

Answer 2

The bang-bang operator !! only works with "tidy" functions. It's not a part of the core R language. A base R function like lm() has no idea how to expand such operators. Instead, you need to wrap those in functions that can do the expansion. rlang::expr is one such example
rlang::expr(summary(lm(y ~ !!rlang::sym(var) + x2, data=df2)))
# summary(lm(y ~ x1 + x2, data = df2))
Then you need to use rlang::eval_tidy to actually evaluate it
rlang::eval_tidy(rlang::expr(summary(lm(y ~ !!rlang::sym(var) + x2, data=df2))))
# Call:
# lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2, data = df2)
#
# Residuals:
# Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
# -0.49178 -0.25482 0.00027 0.24566 0.50730
#
# Coefficients:
# Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
# (Intercept) 0.4953683 0.0242949 20.390 <2e-16 ***
# x1 -0.0006298 0.0314389 -0.020 0.984
# x2 -0.0052848 0.0318073 -0.166 0.868
# ---
# Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
#
# Residual standard error: 0.2882 on 997 degrees of freedom
# Multiple R-squared: 2.796e-05, Adjusted R-squared: -0.001978
# F-statistic: 0.01394 on 2 and 997 DF, p-value: 0.9862
You can see this version preserves the expanded formula in the model object.

Answer 3

1) Just use lm(df2) or if lm has additional columns beyond what is shown in the question but we just want to regress on x1 and x2 then
df3 <- df2[c("y", var, "x2")]
lm(df3)
The following are optional and only apply if it is important that the formula appear in the output as if it had been explicitly given.
Compute the formula fo using the first line below and then run lm as in the second line:
fo <- formula(model.frame(df3))
fm <- do.call("lm", list(fo, quote(df3)))
or just run lm as in the first line below and then write the formula into it as in the second line:
fm <- lm(df3)
fm$call <- formula(model.frame(df3))
Either one gives this:
> fm
Call:
lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2, data = df3)
Coefficients:
(Intercept) x1 x2
0.44752 0.04278 0.05011
2) character string lm accepts a character string for the formula so this also works. The fn$ causes substitution to occur in the character arguments.
library(gsubfn)
fn$lm("y ~ $var + x2", quote(df2))
or at the expense of more involved code, without gsubfn:
do.call("lm", list(sprintf("y ~ %s + x2", var), quote(df2)))
or if you don't care that the formula displays without var substituted then just:
lm(sprintf("y ~ %s + x2", var), df2)