Interpretation auto.arima results in R - r

As a beginner, I am trying to understand the auto.arima function in the R forecasting package.
Particularly, I am interested in the selection based on the information criteria.
For instance, I set ic=c("aicc","aic", "bic").
I then obtain the best fitting model with AIC, AICc, and BIC.
I also obtain a certain output value for every tested model, e.g. -18661.23 for (1,1,1); -18451.12 for (1,1,2) etc. If e.g. (1,1,1) is the selected model with lowest output value, this value is not equal to the given AIC, AICc, or BIC.
In simple words, how do I interpret the output value of every model? Is it a parallely weighted AIC, AICc, and BIC?
P.S.: I really tried to understand the documentation but it is hard for me to read.
Thank you very much in advance!

As far as I can tell, by "output value" you mean the value printed when you use auto.arima with trace=TRUE.
These values are the AIC (or AICc or BIC) for each model tried. An approximation is used during the search to speed things up, so the value printed may different slightly from the value returned, which is calculated without the approximation.
The argument ic determines which information criterion will be used. For example, setting ic="bic" means that the BIC is used in selecting the model. By default, ic="aicc".
In a function definition, an argument with default value equal to a vector of values is often a shorthand for showing what the possible values that argument can take, with the first value in the vector equal to the default. In this case, the function definition contains ic = c("aicc", "aic", "bic") meaning that ic can take only one of those three values, and the default is aicc if ic is not explicitly passed.

Related

the meaning of model output number in R for linear regression model

Do I understand correctly that the value (model output) retrieving from evaluate_model() for the linear regression model is RMSE?
No, the column output, model_output, is not the root mean square error (RMSE). It is the prediction value for your model.
So it appears that the evaluate_model() function is from the statisticalModeling package.
According to the documentation for this function, it "Evaluate a model for specified inputs" and (emphasis added below)
Find the model outputs for specified inputs. This is equivalent to the generic predict() function, except it will choose sensible values by default. This simplifies getting a quick look at model values.
In other words, this function, evaluate_model(), takes inputs and shows you the "prediction" of your input data using the model.
For your instance, evaluate_model() will take each row of your data and use the column/variable information (age, sex, coverage) for each row, and fits the data to estimate what the dependent variable would be based on this model.

bam() returns negative deviance explained values

I'm trying to run GAMs to analyze some temperature data. I have remote cameras and external temperature loggers, and I'm trying to model the difference in the temperatures recorded by them (camera temperature - logger temperature). Most of the time, the cameras are recording higher temperatures, but sometimes, the logger returns the higher temperature, in which case the difference ends up being a negative value. The direction of the difference is something that I care about, so I do have to have non-positive values as a response. My explanatory variables are percent canopy cover (quantitative), direct and diffuse radiation (quant.), and camera direction (ordered factor) as fixed effects as well as the camera/logger pair (factor) for a random effect.
I had mostly been using the gam() function in mgcv to run my models. I'm using a scat distribution since my data is heavy-tailed. My model code is as follows:
gam(f1, family = scat(link = "identity"), data = d)
I wanted to try using bam() since I have 60,000 data points (one temperature observation per hour of the day for several months). The gam() models run fine, though they take a while to run. But the exact same model formulas run in bam() end up returning negative deviance explained values. I also get 50+ warning messages that all say:
In y - mu : longer object length is not a multiple of shorter object length
Running gam.check() on the fitted models returns identical residuals plots. The parametric coefficients, smooth terms, and R-squared values are also almost identical. The only things that have really noticeably changed are the deviance explained values, and they've changed to something completely nonsensical (the deviance explained values for the bam() models range from -61% to -101% deviance explained).
I'll admit that I'm brand new to using GAM's. I know just enough to know that the residuals plots are more important than the deviance explained values, and the residuals plots look good (way better than they did with a Gaussian distribution, at least). More than anything, I'm curious about what's going on within the bam() function specifically that's causing the function to pass that warning and return a negative deviance explained value. Is there some extra argument that I can set in bam() or some further manipulations I can do to my data to prevent this from happening, or can I ignore it and move forward since my residuals plots look good and the outputs are mostly the same?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Initial values for non least squares fit in R

I am doing a model fitting using minpack.lm package. The objective function is the residual between my experimental data & my ODE model.
The tricky thing is the initial value for my ODE model. So I use a loop to run randomly initial values and keep the best result which minimizes the objective function.
The problem is that if the random initial value is bad, my model can't solve the ODE equation, the result I get is either NAN or errors such as the problem not converged or number of time steps 1 exceeded maxsteps at t = 0. So my questions are:
Is there any way to stop when the initial value is bad and pass to the next initial value in one loop?
Do you have any advice to choose a best initial value than run randomly?
Thanks a lot

How to use robust Fitting of Nonlinear Regression Models in nlslm?

My goal is to estimate two parameters of a model (see CE_hat).
I use 7 observations to fit two parameters: (w,a), so overfitting occurs a few times. One idea would be to restrict the influence of each observation so that outliers do not "hijack" the parameter estimates.
The method that has been previously suggested to me was nlrob. The problem with that however is that extreme cases such as the example below, return Missing value or an infinity produced when evaluating the model.
To avoid this I used nlsLM which works towards a convergence at the cost of returning outlandish estimates.
Any ideas as to how I can use robust fitting with this example?
I include below a reproducible example. The observables here are CE, H and L. These three elements are fed into a function (CE_hat) in order to estimate "a" and "w". Values close to 1 for "a" and close to 0.5 for "w" are generally considered to be more reasonable. As you - hopefully - can see, when all observations are included, a=91, while w=next to 0. However, if we were to exclude the 4th (or 7th) observation (for CE, H and L), we get much more sensible estimates. Ideally, I would like to achieve the same result, without excluding these observations. One idea would be to restrict their influence. I understand that it might not be as clear why these observations constitute some sort of "outliers". It's hard to say something about that without saying too much I am afraid but I am happy to go into more details about the model should a question arise.
library("minpack.lm")
options("scipen"=50)
CE<-c(3.34375,6.6875,7.21875,13.375,14.03125,14.6875,12.03125)
H<-c(4,8,12,16,16,16,16)
L<-c(0,0,0,0,4,8,12)
CE_hat<-function(w,H,a,L){(w*(H^a-L^a)+L^a)^(1/a)}
aw<-nlsLM(CE~CE_hat(w,H,a,L),
start=list(w=0.5,a=1),
control = nls.lm.control(nprint=1,maxiter=100))
summary(aw)$parameters

Hmm training with multiple observations and mhsmm package in R

i wanted to train a new hmm model, by means of Poisson observations that are the only thing i know.
I'm using the mhsmm package for R.
The first thing that bugs me is the initialization of the model, in the examples is:
J<-3
initial <- rep(1/J,J)
P <- matrix(1/J, nrow = J, ncol = J)
b <- list(lambda=c(1,3,6))
model = hmmspec(init=initial, trans=P, parms.emission=b,dens.emission=dpois.hsmm)
in my case i don't have initial values for the emission distribution parameters, that's what i want to estimate. How?
Secondly: if i only have observations, how do i pass them to
h1 = hmmfit(list_of_observations, model ,mstep=mstep.pois)
in order to obtain the trained model?
list_of_observations, in the examples, contains a vector of states, one of observations and one of observation sequence length and is usually obtained by a simulation of the model:
list_of_observations = simulate(model, N, rand.emis = rpois.hsmm)
EDIT: Found this old question with an answer that partially solved my problem:
MHSMM package in R-Input Format?
These two lines did the trick:
train <- list(x = data.df$sequences, N = N)
class(train) <- "hsmm.data"
where data.df$sequences is the array containing all observations sequences and N is the array containing the count of observations for each sequence.
Still, the initial model is totally random, but i guess this is the way it is meant to be since it will be re-estimated, am i right?
The problem of initialization is critical not only for HMMs and HSMMs, but for all learning methods based on a form of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. EM converges to a local optimum in terms of likelihood between model and data, but that does not always guarantee to reach the global optimum.
Goal: find estimates of the emission distribution but it also works for initial probability and transition matrix
Algorithm: needs initial estimate to start the optimisation from
You: have to provide an initial "guess" of the parameters
This may seem confusing at first, but the EM algorithm needs a point to start the optimisation. Then it makes some computations and it gives you a better estimate of your own initial guess (re-estimation, as you said). It is not able to just find the best parameters on its own, without being initialised.
From my experience, there is no general way to initialise the parameters that guarantee to converge to a global optimum, but it will depend more on the case at hand. That's why initialisation plays a critical role (mostly for emission distribution).
What I used to do in such a case is to separate the training data in different groups (e.g. percentiles of a certain parameter in the set), estimate the parameters on these groups, and then use them as initial parameter estimates for the EM algorithm. Basically, you have to try different methods and see which one works best.
I'd recommend to search the literature if similar problems have been solved with HMM, and try their initialisation method.

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