Save priors in rjags - r

I'm running a bayesian model in rjags, and I would like to be able to output a plot of the trace of the MCMC, the posterior distribution for my parameters (which I can already obtain from coda), and a comparison of the posterior vs. prior distributions.
Is there any way to save the priors you specify in the jags model part as a list or something that would not force me to copy and paste (then exponentially rising the likelihood of errors) all the distributions with their own parameters?
I have the following piece of code
cat(
'model{
for(i in 1:n){
P.hat[i] ~ dnorm(pi, df/sigma2)
SS[i] ~ dgamma((df-1)/2, sigma2/2 )
R[i] ~ dbin(theta, N)
}
# relations
gam <- m*vs+(1-m)*va
theta <- (pi*beta*gam)/(gam*dt+(1-gam)*du)
# numerical values
df <- 15
# priors
pi ~ dnorm(0.05, 2)I(0,1)
sigma2 ~ dgamma(2, 0.1*df)
beta ~ dunif(0, 0.4)
m ~ dbeta(1, 4)
vs ~ dbeta(2, 9)
va ~ dbeta(2, 5)
dt ~ dnorm(0.3, 2)I(0,10)
du ~ dnorm(1.25, 2)I(0,10)
}',
file='model1.bug')
and I would like to "save" the "priors" section.
Thanks in advance for all your answers!
EM

The short answer is no - JAGS (and BUGS) make no explicit distinction between what you define as priors and the other distributions in the model, so there is no way to ask JAGS to give you information on specific sub-sections of the model. The usual way to look at your prior distributions is to plot (or otherwise summarise) them separately within R.
However, there is a trick that will work with your model to get what you want: set the upper index of your loop (n) to 0 (in the data). This will cause JAGS to totally ignore everything within that for loop, effectively removing the likelihood component of your model, leaving only the priors. If you monitor pi, sigma2 etc etc you should see a distribution of the priors for these parameters. As there is no likelihood to compute, you should also see the model runs much faster! You do need to run the model twice though (once for the priors and once with the data as normal for the posteriors).

Related

Optimizing a GAM for Smoothness

I am currently trying to generate a general additive model in R using a response variable and three predictor variables. One of the predictors is linear, and the dataset consists of 298 observations.
I have run the following code to generate a basic GAM:
GAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5])
This produces a model with 18 degrees of freedom and seems to substantially overfit the data. I'm wondering how I might generate a GAM that maximizes smoothness and predictive error. I realize that each of these features is going to come at the expense of the other, but is there good a way to find the optimal model that doesn't overfit?
Additionally, I need to perform leave one out cross validation (LOOCV), and I am not sure how to make sure that gam() does this in the MGCV package. Any help on either of these problems uld be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
I've run this to generate a GAM, but it overfits the data.
GAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5])
I have also generated 1,000,000 GAMs with varying combinations of smoothing parameters and ranged the maximum degrees of freedom allowed from 10 (as shown in the code below) to 19. The variable "combinations2" is a list of all 1,000,000 combinations of smoothers I selected. This code is designed to try and balance degrees of freedom and AIC score. It does function, but I'm not sure that I'm actually going to be able to find the optimal model from this. I also cannot tell how to make sure that it uses LOOCV.
BestGAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ predictor2+ predictor3, data = data[2:5])
for(i in 1:100000){
PotentialGAM <- gam(response~ linearpredictor+ s(predictor2) + s(predictor3), data = data[2:5], sp=c(combinations2[i,]$Var1,combinations2[i,]$Var2))
if (AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$df[1] <= 10 & AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$AIC[1] < AIC(PotentialGAM,BestGAM)$AIC[2]){
BestGAM <<- PotentialGAM
listNumber <- i
}
}
You are fitting your GAM using generalised cross validation (GCV) smoothness selection. GCV is a way to get around the invariance problem of ordinary cross validation (OCV; what you also call LOOCV) when estimating GAMs. Note that GCV is the same as OCV on a rotated version of the fitting problem (rotating y - Xβ by Q, any orthogonal matrix), and while when fitting with GCV {mgcv} doesn't actually need to do the rotation and the expected GCV score isn't affected by the rotation, GCV is just OCV (wood 2017, p. 260)
It has been shown that GCV can undersmooth (resulting in more wiggly models) as the objective function (GCV profile) can become flat around the optimum. Instead it is preferred to estimate GAMs (with penalized smooths) using REML or ML smoothness selection; add method = "REML" (or "ML") to your gam() call.
If the REML or ML fit is as wiggly as the GCV one with your data, then I'd be likely to presume gam() is not overfitting, but that there is something about your response data that hasn't been explained here (are the data ordered in time, for example?)
As to your question
how I might generate a GAM that maximizes smoothness and [minimize?] predictive error,
you are already doing that using GCV smoothness selection and for a particular definition of "smoothness" (in this case it is squared second derivatives of the estimated smooths, integrated over the range of the covariates, and summed over smooths).
If you want GCV but smoother models, you can increase the gamma argument above 1; gamma 1.4 is often used for example, which means that each EDF costs 40% more in the GCV criterion.
FWIW, you can get the LOOCV (OCV) score for your model without actually fitting 288 GAMs through the use of the influence matrix A. Here's a reproducible example using my {gratia} package:
library("gratia")
library("mgcv")
df <- data_sim("eg1", seed = 1)
m <- gam(y ~ s(x0) + s(x1) + s(x2) + s(x3), data = df, method = "REML")
A <- influence(m)
r <- residuals(m, type = "response")
ocv_score <- mean(r^2 / (1 - A))

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.

JAGS Random Effects Model Prediction

I'm trying to model a bayesian regression using an index as response (D47), temperature as predictor (Temp) and considering the random effects of a discrete variable (Material). I've found really good information regarding non-hierarchical regressions, some posts including even a prediction strategy for these models. Despite this, I've found a remarkable problem when predicting D47 values in my model, mostly because of the random intercept.
Is there any way to deal with a random intercept during the prediction of a JAGS regression?
Thanks for your answer,
model1<-"model {
# Priors
mu_int~dnorm(0, 0.0001) # Mean hyperparameter for random intercepts
sigma_int~dunif(0, 100) # SD hyperparameter for random intercepts
tau_int <- 1/(sigma_int*sigma_int)
for (i in 1:n) {
alpha[i]~dnorm(mu_int, tau_int) # Random intercepts
}
beta~dnorm(0, 0.01) # Common slope
sigma_res~dunif(0, 100) # Residual standard deviation
tau_res <- 1/(sigma_res*sigma_res)
# Likelihood
for (i in 1:n) {
mu[i] <- alpha[Mat[i]]+beta*Temp[i] # Expectation
D47[i]~dnorm(mu[i], tau_res) # The actual (random) responses
}
}"
Sure, you can make predictions with the random intercepts, all you need to do is specify it as some sort of derived quantity.
Try adding something like this to the model.
for(i in 1:(n)){
D47_pred[i] <- dnorm(mu[i], tau_res)
}
And then track D47_pred as a parameter.
edit:
Also, you need to change how you specify the prior for the random intercept. This will take a couple steps (updated code here from comments).
You will need to add a new constant to your data list, which represents the number of unique groups in vector Mat. I have labeled it M in this case (e.g. 4 groups in Mat, M = 4)
for (j in 1:(M)){
alpha[j] ~ dnorm(mu_int, tau_int) # Random intercepts
}
This specification just makes the correct number of random intercepts for your model

Command for finding the best linear model in R

Is there a way to get R to run all possible models (with all combinations of variables in a dataset) to produce the best/most accurate linear model and then output that model?
I feel like there is a way to do this, but I am having a hard time finding the information.
There are numerous ways this could be achieved, but for a simple way of doing this I would suggest that you have a look at the glmulti package, which is described in detail in this paper:
glmulti: An R Package for Easy Automated Model Selection with (Generalized) Linear Models
Alternatively, very simple example of the model selection as available on the Quick-R website:
# Stepwise Regression
library(MASS)
fit <- lm(y~x1+x2+x3,data=mydata)
step <- stepAIC(fit, direction="both")
step$anova # display results
Or to simplify even more, you can do more manual model comparison:
fit1 <- lm(y ~ x1 + x2 + x3 + x4, data=mydata)
fit2 <- lm(y ~ x1 + x2, data=mydata)
anova(fit1, fit2)
This should get you started. Although you should read my comment from above. This should build you a model based on all the data in your dataset and then compare all of the models with AIC and BIC.
# create a NULL vector called model so we have something to add our layers to
model=NULL
# create a vector of the dataframe column names used to build the formula
vars = names(data)
# remove variable names you don’t want to use (at least
# the response variable (if its in the first column)
vars = vars[-1]
# the combn function will run every different combination of variables and then run the glm
for(i in 1:length(vars)){
xx = combn(vars,i)
if(is.null(dim(xx))){
fla = paste("y ~", paste(xx, collapse="+"))
model[[length(model)+1]]=glm(as.formula(fla),data=data)
} else {
for(j in 1:dim(xx)[2]){
fla = paste("y ~", paste(xx[1:dim(xx)[1],j], collapse="+"))
model[[length(model)+1]]=glm(as.formula(fla),data=data)
}
}
}
# see how many models were build using the loop above
length(model)
# create a vector to extract AIC and BIC values from the model variable
AICs = NULL
BICs = NULL
for(i in 1:length(model)){
AICs[i] = AIC(model[[i]])
BICs[i] = BIC(model[[i]])
}
#see which models were chosen as best by both methods
which(AICs==min(AICs))
which(BICs==min(BICs))
I ended up running forwards, backwards, and stepwise procedures on data to select models and then comparing them based on AIC, BIC, and adj. R-sq. This method seemed most efficient. However, when I received the actual data to be used (the program I was writing was for business purposes), I was told to only model each explanatory variable against the response, so I was able to just call lm(response ~ explanatory) for each variable in question, since the analysis we ended up using it for wasn't worried about how they interacted with each other.
This is a very old question, but for those who are still encountering this discussion - the package olsrr and specifically the function ols_step_all_possible exhaustively produces an ols model for all possible subsets of variables, based on an lm object (such that by feeding it with a full model you will get all possible combinations), and returns a dataframe with R squared, adjusted R squared, aic, bic, etc. for all the models. This is very helpful in finding the best predictors but it is also very much time consuming.
see https://olsrr.rsquaredacademy.com/reference/ols_step_all_possible.html
I do not recommend just "cherry picking" the best performing model, rather I would actually look at the output and choose carefully for the most reasonable outcome. In case you would want to immediately get the best performing model (by some criteria, say number of predictors and R2) you may write a function that saves the dataframe, arranges it by number of predictors and orders it by descending R2 and spits out the top result.
The dredge() function in R also accomplishes this.

Do I need to set refit=FALSE when testing for random effects in lmer() models with anova()?

I am currently testing whether I should include certain random effects in my lmer model or not. I use the anova function for that. My procedure so far is to fit the model with a function call to lmer() with REML=TRUE (the default option). Then I call anova() on the two models where one of them does include the random effect to be tested for and the other one doees not. However, it is well known that the anova() function refits the model with ML but in the new version of anova() you can prevent anova() from doing so by setting the option refit=FALSE. In order to test for random effects should I set refit=FALSE in my call to anova() or not? (If I do set refit=FALSE the p-values tend to be lower. Are the p-values anti-conservative when I set refit=FALSE?)
Method 1:
mod0_reml <- lmer(x ~ y + z + (1 | w), data=dat)
mod1_reml <- lmer(x ~ y + z + (y | w), data=dat)
anova(mod0_reml, mod1_reml)
This will result in anova() refitting the models with ML instead of REML. (Newer versions of the anova() function will also output an info about this.)
Method 2:
mod0_reml <- lmer(x ~ y + z + (1 | w), data=dat)
mod1_reml <- lmer(x ~ y + z + (y | w), data=dat)
anova(mod0_reml, mod1_reml, refit=FALSE)
This will result in anova() performing its calculations on the original models, i.e. with REML=TRUE.
Which of the two methods is correct in order to test whether I should include a random effect or not?
Thanks for any help
In general I would say that it would be appropriate to use refit=FALSE in this case, but let's go ahead and try a simulation experiment.
First fit a model without a random slope to the sleepstudy data set, then simulate data from this model:
library(lme4)
mod0 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (1|Subject), data=sleepstudy)
## also fit the full model for later use
mod1 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (Days|Subject), data=sleepstudy)
set.seed(101)
simdat <- simulate(mod0,1000)
Now refit the null data with the full and the reduced model, and save the distribution of p-values generated by anova() with and without refit=FALSE. This is essentially a parametric bootstrap test of the null hypothesis; we want to see if it has the appropriate characteristics (i.e., uniform distribution of p-values).
sumfun <- function(x) {
m0 <- refit(mod0,x)
m1 <- refit(mod1,x)
a_refit <- suppressMessages(anova(m0,m1)["m1","Pr(>Chisq)"])
a_no_refit <- anova(m0,m1,refit=FALSE)["m1","Pr(>Chisq)"]
c(refit=a_refit,no_refit=a_no_refit)
}
I like plyr::laply for its convenience, although you could just as easily use a for loop or one of the other *apply approaches.
library(plyr)
pdist <- laply(simdat,sumfun,.progress="text")
library(ggplot2); theme_set(theme_bw())
library(reshape2)
ggplot(melt(pdist),aes(x=value,fill=Var2))+
geom_histogram(aes(y=..density..),
alpha=0.5,position="identity",binwidth=0.02)+
geom_hline(yintercept=1,lty=2)
ggsave("nullhist.png",height=4,width=5)
Type I error rate for alpha=0.05:
colMeans(pdist<0.05)
## refit no_refit
## 0.021 0.026
You can see that in this case the two procedures give practically the same answer and both procedures are strongly conservative, for well-known reasons having to do with the fact that the null value of the hypothesis test is on the boundary of its feasible space. For the specific case of testing a single simple random effect, halving the p-value gives an appropriate answer (see Pinheiro and Bates 2000 and others); this actually appears to give reasonable answers here, although it is not really justified because here we are dropping two random-effects parameters (the random effect of slope and the correlation between the slope and intercept random effects):
colMeans(pdist/2<0.05)
## refit no_refit
## 0.051 0.055
Other points:
You might be able to do a similar exercise with the PBmodcomp function from the pbkrtest package.
The RLRsim package is designed precisely for fast randomization (parameteric bootstrap) tests of null hypotheses about random effects terms, but doesn't appear to work in this slightly more complex situation
see the relevant GLMM faq section for similar information, including arguments for why you might not want to test the significance of random effects at all ...
for extra credit you could redo the parametric bootstrap runs using the deviance (-2 log likelihood) differences rather than the p-values as output and check whether the results conformed to a mixture between a chi^2_0 (point mass at 0) and a chi^2_n distribution (where n is probably 2, but I wouldn't be sure for this geometry)

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