Variable selection methods - r

I have been doing variable selection for a modeling problem.
I have used trial and error for the selection (adding / removing a variable) with a decrease in error. However, I have the challenge as the number of variables grows into the hundreds that manual variable selection can not be performed as the model takes 1/2 hour to compute, rendering the task impossible.
Would you happen to know of any other packages than the regsubsets from the leaps package (which when tested with the same trial and error variables produced a higher error, it did not include some variables which were lineraly dependant - excluding some valuable variables).

You need a better (i.e. not flawed) approach to model selection. There are plenty of options, but one that should be easy to adapt to your situation would be using some form of regularization, such as the Lasso or the elastic net. These apply shrinkage to the sizes of the coefficients; if a coefficient is shrunk from its least squares solution to zero, that variable is removed from the model. The resulting model coefficients are slightly biased but they have lower variance than the selected OLS terms.
Take a look at the lars, glmnet, and penalized packages

Try using the stepAIC function of the MASS package.
Here is a really minimal example:
library(MASS)
data(swiss)
str(swiss)
lm <- lm(Fertility ~ ., data = swiss)
lm$coefficients
## (Intercept) Agriculture Examination Education Catholic
## 66.9151817 -0.1721140 -0.2580082 -0.8709401 0.1041153
## Infant.Mortality
## 1.0770481
st1 <- stepAIC(lm, direction = "both")
st2 <- stepAIC(lm, direction = "forward")
st3 <- stepAIC(lm, direction = "backward")
summary(st1)
summary(st2)
summary(st3)
You should try the 3 directions and ckeck which model works better with your test data.
Read ?stepAIC and take a look at the examples.
EDIT
It's true stepwise regression isn't the greatest method. As it's mentioned in GavinSimpson answer, lasso regression is a better/much more efficient method. It's much faster than stepwise regression and will work with large datasets.
Check out the glmnet package vignette:
http://www.stanford.edu/~hastie/glmnet/glmnet_alpha.html

Related

Heterocesdastic model of mixed effects via lmer function

I am adjusting a mixed effects model which, due to the observed heteroscedasticity, it was necessary to include an effect to accommodate it. Therefore, using the lme function of the nlme package, this was easy to be solved, see the code below:
library(nlme)
library(lme4)
Model1 <- lme(log(Var1)~log(Var2)+log(Var3)+
(Var4)+(Var5),
random = ~1|Var6, Data1, method="REML",
weights = varIdent(form=~1|Var7))
#Var6: It is a factor with several levels.
#Var7: It is a Dummy variable.
However, I need to readjust the model described above using the lme4 package, that is, using the lmer function. It is known and many are the materials that inform some limitations existing in the lme4, such as, for example, modeling heteroscedasticity. What motivated me to readjust this model is the fact that I have an interest in using a specific package that in cases of mixed models it only accepts if they are adjusted through the lmer function. How could I resolve this situation? Below is a good part of the model adjusted using the lmer function, however, this model is not considering the effect to model the observed heteroscedasticity.
Model2 <- lmer(log(Var1)~log(Var2)+log(Var3)+
(Var4)+(Var5)+(1|Var6),
Data1, REML=T)
Regarding the choice of the random effect (Var6) and the inclusion of the effect to consider the heterogeneity by levels of the variable (Var7), these were carefully analyzed, however, I will not put here the whole procedure so as not to be an extensive post and to be more objective .
This is hackable. You need to add an observation-level random effect that is only applied to the group with the larger residual variance (you need to know this in advance!), via (0+dummy(Var7,"1")|obs); this has the effect of multiplying each observation-level random effect value by 1 if the observation is in group "1" of Var7, 0 otherwise. You also need to use lmerControl() to override a few checks that lmer does to try to make sure you are not adding redundant random effects.
Data1$obs <- factor(seq(nrow(Data1)))
Model2 <- lmer(log(Var1)~log(Var2)+log(Var3)+
(Var4)+(Var5) + (1|Var6) +
(0+dummy(Var7,"1")|obs),
Data1, REML=TRUE,
control=lmerControl(check.nobs.vs.nlev="ignore",
check.nobs.vs.nRE="ignore"))
all.equal(REMLcrit(Model2), c(-2*logLik(Model1))) ## TRUE
all.equal(fixef(Model1), fixef(Model2), tolerance=1e-7)
If you want to use this model with hnp you need to work around the fact that hnp doesn't pass the lmerControl option properly.
library(hnp)
d <- function(obj) resid(obj, type="pearson")
s <- function(n, obj) simulate(obj)[[1]]
f <- function(y.) refit(Model2, y.)
hnp(Model2, newclass=TRUE, diagfun=d, simfun=s, fitfun=f)
You might also be interested in the DHARMa package, which does similar simulation-based diagnostics.

R language, how to use bootstraps to generate maximum likelihood and AICc?

Sorry for a quite stupid question. I am doing multiple comparisons of morphologic traits through correlations of bootstraped data. I'm curious if such multiple comparisons are impacting my level of inference, as well as the effect of the potential multicollinearity in my data. Perhaps, a reasonable option would be to use my bootstraps to generate maximum likelihood and then generate AICc-s to do comparisons with all of my parameters, to see what comes out as most important... the problem is that although I have (more or less clear) the way, I don't know how to implement this in R. Can anybody be so kind as to throw some light on this for me?
So far, here an example (using R language, but not my data):
library(boot)
data(iris)
head(iris)
# The function
pearson <- function(data, indices){
dt<-data[indices,]
c(
cor(dt[,1], dt[,2], method='p'),
median(dt[,1]),
median(dt[,2])
)
}
# One example: iris$Sepal.Length ~ iris$Sepal.Width
# I calculate the r-squared with 1000 replications
set.seed(12345)
dat <- iris[,c(1,2)]
dat <- na.omit(dat)
results <- boot(dat, statistic=pearson, R=1000)
# 95% CIs
boot.ci(results, type="bca")
BOOTSTRAP CONFIDENCE INTERVAL CALCULATIONS
Based on 1000 bootstrap replicates
CALL :
boot.ci(boot.out = results, type = "bca")
Intervals :
Level BCa
95% (-0.2490, 0.0423 )
Calculations and Intervals on Original Scale
plot(results)
I have several more pairs of comparisons.
More of a Cross Validated question.
Multicollinearity shouldn't be a problem if you're just assessing the relationship between two variables (in your case correlation). Multicollinearity only becomes an issue when you fit a model, e.g. multiple regression, with several highly correlated predictors.
Multiple comparisons is always a problem though because it increases your type-I error. The way to address that is to do a multiple comparison correction, e.g. Bonferroni-Holm or the less conservative FDR. That can have its downsides though, especially if you have a lot of predictors and few observations - it may lower your power so much that you won't be able to find any effect, no matter how big it is.
In high-dimensional setting like this, your best bet may be with some sort of regularized regression method. With regularization, you put all predictors into your model at once, similarly to doing multiple regression, however, the trick is that you constrain the model so that all of the regression slopes are pulled towards zero, so that only the ones with the big effects "survive". The machine learning versions of regularized regression are called ridge, LASSO, and elastic net, and they can be fitted using the glmnet package. There is also Bayesian equivalents in so-called shrinkage priors, such as horseshoe (see e.g. https://avehtari.github.io/modelselection/regularizedhorseshoe_slides.pdf). You can fit Bayesian regularized regression using the brms package.

Pseudo R squared for cumulative link function

I have an ordinal dependent variable and trying to use a number of independent variables to predict it. I use R. The function I use is clm in the ordinal package, to perform a cumulative link function with a probit link, to be precise:
I tried the function pR2 in the package pscl to get the pseudo R squared with no success.
How do I get pseudo R squareds with the clm function?
Thanks so much for your help.
There are a variety of pseudo-R^2. I don't like to use any of them because I do not see the results as having a meaning in the real world. They do not estimate effect sizes of any sort and they are not particularly good for statistical inference. Furthermore in situations like this with multiple observations per entity, I think it is debatable which value for "n" (the number of subjects) or the degrees of freedom is appropriate. Some people use McFadden's R^2 which would be relatively easy to calculate, since clm generated a list with one of its values named "logLik". You just need to know that the logLikelihood is only a multiplicative constant (-2) away from the deviance. If one had the model in the first example:
library(ordinal)
data(wine)
fm1 <- clm(rating ~ temp * contact, data = wine)
fm0 <- clm(rating ~ 1, data = wine)
( McF.pR2 <- 1 - fm1$logLik/fm0$logLik )
[1] 0.1668244
I had seen this question on CrossValidated and was hoping to see the more statistically sophisticated participants over there take this one on, but they saw it as a programming question and dumped it over here. Perhaps their opinion of R^2 as a worthwhile measure is as low as mine?
Recommend to use function nagelkerke from rcompanion package to get Pseudo r-squared.
When your predictor or outcome variables are categorical or ordinal, the R-Squared will typically be lower than with truly numeric data. R-squared merely a very weak indicator about model's fit, and you can't choose model based on this.

Logistic Regression Using R

I am running logistic regressions using R right now, but I cannot seem to get many useful model fit statistics. I am looking for metrics similar to SAS:
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/sas/output/sas_logit_output.htm
Does anyone know how (or what packages) I can use to extract these stats?
Thanks
Here's a Poisson regression example:
## from ?glm:
d.AD <- data.frame(counts=c(18,17,15,20,10,20,25,13,12),
outcome=gl(3,1,9),
treatment=gl(3,3))
glm.D93 <- glm(counts ~ outcome + treatment,data = d.AD, family=poisson())
Now define a function to fit an intercept-only model with the same response, family, etc., compute summary statistics, and combine them into a table (matrix). The formula .~1 in the update command below means "refit the model with the same response variable [denoted by the dot on the LHS of the tilde] but with only an intercept term [denoted by the 1 on the RHS of the tilde]"
glmsumfun <- function(model) {
glm0 <- update(model,.~1) ## refit with intercept only
## apply built-in logLik (log-likelihood), AIC,
## BIC (Bayesian/Schwarz Information Criterion) functions
## to models with and without intercept ('model' and 'glm0');
## combine the results in a two-column matrix with appropriate
## row and column names
matrix(c(logLik(glm.D93),BIC(glm.D93),AIC(glm.D93),
logLik(glm0),BIC(glm0),AIC(glm0)),ncol=2,
dimnames=list(c("logLik","SC","AIC"),c("full","intercept_only")))
}
Now apply the function:
glmsumfun(glm.D93)
The results:
full intercept_only
logLik -23.38066 -26.10681
SC 57.74744 54.41085
AIC 56.76132 54.21362
EDIT:
anova(glm.D93,test="Chisq") gives a sequential analysis of deviance table containing df, deviance (=-2 log likelihood), residual df, residual deviance, and the likelihood ratio test (chi-squared test) p-value.
drop1(glm.D93) gives a table with the AIC values (df, deviances, etc.) for each single-term deletion; drop1(glm.D93,test="Chisq") additionally gives the LRT test p value.
Certainly glm with a family="binomial" argument is the function most commonly used for logistic regression. The default handling of contrasts of factors is different. R uses treatment contrasts and SAS (I think) uses sum contrasts. You can look these technical issues up on R-help. They have been discussed many, many times over the last ten+ years.
I see Greg Snow mentioned lrm in 'rms'. It has the advantage of being supported by several other functions in the 'rms' suite of methods. I would use it , too, but learning the rms package may take some additional time. I didn't see an option that would create SAS-like output.
If you want to compare the packages on similar problems that UCLA StatComputing pages have another resource: http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/dae/default.htm , where a large number of methods are exemplified in SPSS, SAS, Stata and R.
Using the lrm function in the rms package may give you the output that you are looking for.

Regression evaluation in R

Are there any utilities/packages for showing various performance metrics of a regression model on some labeled test data? Basic stuff I can easily write like RMSE, R-squared, etc., but maybe with some extra utilities for visualization, or reporting the distribution of prediction confidence/variance, or other things I haven't thought of. This is usually reported in most training utilities (like caret's train), but only over the training data (AFAICT). Thanks in advance.
This question is really quite broad and should be focused a bit, but here's a small subset of functions written to work with linear models:
x <- rnorm(seq(1,100,1))
y <- rnorm(seq(1,100,1))
model <- lm(x~y)
#general summary
summary(model)
#Visualize some diagnostics
plot(model)
#Coefficient values
coef(model)
#Confidence intervals
confint(model)
#predict values
predict(model)
#predict new values
predict(model, newdata = data.frame(y = 1:10))
#Residuals
resid(model)
#Standardized residuals
rstandard(model)
#Studentized residuals
rstudent(model)
#AIC
AIC(model)
#BIC
BIC(model)
#Cook's distance
cooks.distance(model)
#DFFITS
dffits(model)
#lots of measures related to model fit
influence.measures(model)
Bootstrap confidence intervals for parameters of models can be computed using the recommended package boot. It is a very general package requiring you to write a simple wrapper function to return the parameter of interest, say fit the model with some supplied data and return one of the model coefficients, whilst it takes care of the rest, doing the sampling and computation of intervals etc.
Consider also the caret package, which is a wrapper around a large number of modelling functions, but also provides facilities to compare model performance using a range of metrics using an independent test set or a resampling of the training data (k-fold, bootstrap). caret is well documented and quite easy to use, though to get the best out of it, you do need to be familiar with the modelling function you want to employ.

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