Regression: Generalized Additive Model - r

I have started to work with GAM in R and I’ve acquired Simon Wood’s excellent book on the topic. Based on one of his examples, I am looking at the following:
library(mgcv)
data(trees)
ct1<-gam(log(Volume) ~ Height + s(Girth), data=trees)
I have two general questions to this example:
How does one decide when a variable in the model estimation should be parametric (such as Height) or when it should be smooth (such as Girth)? Does one hold an advantage over the other and is there a way to determine what is the optimal type for a variable is? If anybody has any literature about this topic, I’d be happy to know of it.
Say I want to look closer at the weights of ct1: ct1$coefficients. Can I use them as the gam-procedure outputs them, or do I have to transform them before analyzing them given that I am fitting to log(Volume)? In the case of the latter, I guess I would have to use exp (ct1$coefficients)

Related

Linear mixed model in replicated crossover design

I am struggling on how to fit the model for replicated crossover design using REML method. The suggested model by FDA is as above and can someone help on how to code it into R coding ? This is my coding and I wonder if it is right or wrong ?
samplePK.lmer <- lmer(ykir2~1+Treatment:Sequence:Replication+
(1|Subject:Sequence:Treatment), data=samplePK, REML=TRUE)
I would say the formula should be
response ~ trt + trt:seq:rep + (trt|subj:seq)
The key difference from your specification is that (trt|subj:seq) is fitting something like a randomized-block or random-slopes model, where we are allowing for the variation of the treatment effect across subject/sequence combinations.
There are a few issues here that I ran into/noticed when trying to fit this model to simulated data:
if we are fitting this with "modern" mixed-model approaches, there will be some parameters aliased between the treatment effect (trt) and the trt:seq:rep term. In a method-of-moments approach this doesn't matter so much (because you never explicitly estimate the parameters), but it leads to complaints about rank-deficient models (which are ignorable if you know what you're doing ...).
it seems wrong that the random effect delta_{ij} is given as having a mean of {mu_R,mu_T}; this is redundant with the fixed effect mu_k
Obviously I could have something wrong or misunderstood something about the original model specification.
I might suggest that you try follow-up questions on the r-sig-mixed-models#r-project.org mailing list, where there is a wide readership with broad expertise (i.e., more expertise on the subject of mixed models specifically than here on StackOverflow)

Comparison of Different Types of Nonlinear Regression Models

Thank you for seeing this post.
Various regression models are being applied to the curve estimating (actual measured ventilation rate).
Comparison was made using the GLM and GAM models including polynomial regression. I use R.
Are there any other types of regression models that can simulate that curve well?
like...bayesian? (In fact, I didn't even understand if it could be applied here)
Sincerely.
loads of non linear methods exist, and many would give similar results, but this is a statistics question. it would fit better on cross validated. also, you have to tell: do you want to do interpolation, even extrapolation? what is your analysis for?
bayesian methods are used when you have knowledge of the phenomenon prior to data, or in some cases when you want to apply regularization or graphical models to data generation processes, I think you should better leave out bayesian statistics here.
edit:
to be short: if you want to obtain a readable formulation of the curve, and you don't have any specific mathematical model in mind, go for a polynomial fit. Other popular choices, which are better for only plotting the curve, instead of reporting it in a mathematical expression, are smoothing splines and LOESS. for further details, maybe ask a new question on stats.stackexchange.com, after studing better the alternatives.

How to train a multiple linear regression model to find the best combination of variables?

I want to run a linear regression model with a large number of variables and I want an R function to iterate on good combinations of these variables and give me the best combination.
The glmulti package will do this fairly effectively:
Automated model selection and model-averaging. Provides a wrapper for glm and other functions, automatically generating all possible models (under constraints set by the user) with the specified response and explanatory variables, and finding the best models in terms of some Information Criterion (AIC, AICc or BIC). Can handle very large numbers of candidate models. Features a Genetic Algorithm to find the best models when an exhaustive screening of the candidates is not feasible.
Unsolicited advice follows:
HOWEVER. Please be aware that while this approach can find the model that minimizes within-sample error (the goodness of fit on your actual data), it has two major problems that should make you think twice about using it.
this type of data-driven model selection will almost always destroy your ability to make reliable inferences (compute p-values, confidence intervals, etc.). See this CrossValidated question.
it may overfit your data (although using the information criteria listed in the package description will help with this)
There are a number of different ways to characterize a "best" model, but AIC is a common one, and base R offers step(), and package MASS offers stepAIC().
summary(lm1 <- lm(Fertility ~ ., data = swiss))
slm1 <- step(lm1)
summary(slm1)
slm1$anova

Most straightforward R package for setting subject as random effect in mixed logit model

I have a dataset in which individuals, each belonging to a particular group, repeatedly chose between multiple discrete outcomes.
subID group choice
1 Big A
1 Big B
2 Small B
2 Small B
2 Small C
3 Big A
3 Big B
. . .
. . .
I want to test how group membership influences choice, and want to account for non-independence of observations due to repeated choices being made by the same individuals. In turn, I planned to implement a mixed multinomial regression treating group as a fixed effect and subID as a random effect. It seems that there are a few options for multinomial logits in R, and I'm hoping for some guidance on which may be most easily implemented for this mixed model:
1) multinom - GLM, via nnet, allows the usage of the multinom function. This appears to be a nice, clear, straightforward option... for fixed effect models. However is there a manner to implement random effects with multinom? A previous CV post suggests that multinom is able to handle mixed-effects GLM with poisson distribution and a log link. However, I don't understand (a) why this is the case or (b) the required syntax. Can anyone clarify?
2) mlogit - A fantastic package, with incredibly helpful vignettes. However, the "mixed logit" documentation refers to models that have random effects related to alternative specific covariates (implemented via the rpar argument). My model has no alternative specific variables; I simply want to account for the random intercepts of the participants. Is this possible with mlogit? Is that variance automatically accounted for by setting subID as the id.var when shaping the data to long form with mlogit.data? EDIT: I just found an example of "tricking" mlogit to provide random coefficients for variables that vary across individuals (very bottom here), but I don't quite understand the syntax involved.
3) MCMCglmm is evidently another option. However, as a relative novice with R and someone completely unfamiliar with Bayesian stats, I'm not personally comfortable parsing example syntax of mixed logits with this package, or, even following the syntax, making guesses at priors or other needed arguments.
Any guidance toward the most straightforward approach and its syntax implementation would be thoroughly appreciated. I'm also wondering if the random effect of subID needs to be nested within group (as individuals are members of groups), but that may be a question for CV instead. In any case, many thanks for any insights.
I would recommend the Apollo package by Hess & Palma. It comes with a great documentation and a quite helpful user group.

Best alternative for stepwise regression in R

I know that there dosens of similar questions/answers, and lots of papers. But please read till the end.
Non-statisticians tend to use stepwise regressions which is strongly argued by statisticians. This is stomething that I don't understand, but I just obey them. "Ok this is not a good way to do your modelling".
Here is (was) my model:
b <- lmer(metric1~a+b+c+d+e+f+g+h+i+j+k+l+(1|X/Y) + (1|Z), data = dataset)
drop1 (b, test="Chisq")
(Just a small note: Watch out for the random effects in my model; random effects are Year, Month, Sampling.location; one of my variables is 1/0: I allready log-transformed my variables)
I am trying to find a exploratory model (with drop1 to reach final model) and evaluating it with my biological knowledge to see if the dependent ("metric" in this case) seems to be responding variables. I will repeat this process with 100 metrics just to evaulate which metrics seems to be responding environmental variables.
I was in the search for an acceptable model instead of stepwise according to the suggestions of statistics gurus.
However, there are lots of alternatives. I read alot, but still feel myself lost. Some say Lasso, some say elastic modelling, some say ridge regression... Which one fits for my purpose?
Any advise for a better alternative and an easy model or a help page for dummies, or examples (that could be better) would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

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