I've tried to contact William Revelle about this but he isn't responding.
In the psych package there is a function called cor.smoother, which determines whether or not a correlation matrix is positive definite. Its explanation is as follows:
"cor.smoother examines all of nvar minors of rank nvar-1 by systematically dropping one variable at a time and finding the eigen value decomposition. It reports those variables, which, when dropped, produce a positive definite matrix. It also reports the number of negative eigenvalues when each variable is dropped. Finally, it compares the original correlation matrix to the smoothed correlation matrix and reports those items with absolute deviations great than cut. These are all hints as to what might be wrong with a correlation matrix."
It is the really the statement in bold that I am hoping someone can interpret in a more understandable way for me?
A belated answer to your question.
Correlation matrices are said to be improper (or more accurately, not positive semi-definite) when at least one of the eigen values of the matrix is less than 0. This can happen if you have some missing data and are using pair-wise complete correlations. It is particularly likely to happen if you are doing tetrachoric or polychoric correlations based upon data sets with some or even a lot of missing data.
(A correlation matrix, R, may be decomposed into a set of eigen vectors (X) and eigen values (lambda) where R = X lambda X’. This decomposition is the basis of components analysis and factor analysis, but that is more than you want to know.)
The cor.smooth function finds the eigen values and then adjusts the negative ones by making them slightly positive (and adjusting the other ones to compensate for this change).
The cor.smoother function attempts to identify the variables that are making the matrix improper. It does this by considering all the matrices generated by dropping one variable at a time and seeing which ones of those are not positive semi-definite (i.e. have eigen values < 0.) Ideally, this will identify one variable that is messing things up.
An example of this is in the burt data set where the sorrow-tenderness correlation was probably mistyped and the .87 should be .81.
cor.smoother(burt) #identifies tenderness and sorrow as likely culprits
I did some digging around, but I'm still very new to the concept of latin hypercube sampling. I found this example which uses the lhs pacakge:
set.seed(1)
randomLHS(5,2)
[,1] [,2]
[1,] 0.84119491 0.89953985
[2,] 0.03531135 0.74352370
[3,] 0.33740457 0.59838122
[4,] 0.47682074 0.07600704
[5,] 0.75396828 0.35548904
From my understanding, the entries in the resulting matrix are the coordinates of 5 points that will be used to determine combinations of two continuous variables.
I'm trying to do a simulation with 5 categorical variables. The number of levels per variable range from 2 to 5. This results in 2 x 3 x 4 x 2 x 5 = 240 scenarios. I'd like to cut it down as much as possible so I was thinking of using a latin hypercube, but I'm confused about how to proceed. Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Also, do you know of any good resources that explains how to analyze the results from latin hypercube sampling?
I'd recommend sticking with the full factorial with 240 design points, for the following reasons.
Heck, this is what computers are for—to automate tedious
computational tasks. 240 design points is nothing, you're doing
this on a computer! You can easily automate the process with nested
loops iterating through the levels, one loop per factor. Don't
forget an innermost loop for replications. If each simulation takes
more than a minute or two, break it across multiple cores or multiple
machines. One of my students recently did this for his MS thesis
work, and was able to run more than a million simulated experiments
over a weekend.
With continuous factors, you generally assume some degree of smoothness in
the response surface and infer/project the response between adjacent design
points based on regression. With categorical data, inference isn't
valid for excluded factor combinations and interactions
may very well be the dominant effects. Unless you do the full
factorial, the combinations you omit may or may not be the most
important ones, but the point is that you'll never know if
you didn't sample there.
In general, you use the same analysis tools you would use if you were doing any other kind of sampling—Regression, logistic regression, ANOVA, partition trees,... For categorical factors, I'm a fan of partition trees.
I have a problem using fisher’s exact test in R with a simulated p-value, but I don’t know if it’s a caused by “the technique” ( R ) or if it is (statistically) intended to work that way.
One of the datasets I want to work with:
matrix(c(103,0,2,1,0,0,1,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,19,3,57,11,2,87,1,2,0,869,4,2,8,1,4,3,18,16,5,60,60,42,1,1,1,1,21,704,40,759,404,151,1491,9,40,144),ncol=2,nrow=27)
The resulting p-value is always the same, no matter how often I repeat the test:
p = 1 / (B+1)
(B = number of replicates used in the Monte Carlo test)
When I shorten the matrix it works if the number of rows is lower than 19. Nevertheless it is not a matter of number of cells in the matrix. After transforming it into a matrix with 3 columns it still does not work, although it does when using the same numbers in just two columns.
Varying simulated p-values:
>a <- matrix(c(103,0,2,1,0,0,1,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,869,4,2,8,1,4,3,18,16,5,60,60,42,1,1,1,1,21),ncol=2,nrow=18)
>b <- matrix(c(103,0,2,1,0,0,1,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,19,869,4,2,8,1,4,3,18,16,5,60,60,42,1,1,1,1,21,704),ncol=2,nrow=19)
>c <- matrix(c(103,0,2,1,0,0,1,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,869,4,2,8,1,4,3,18,16,5,60,60,42,1,1,1,1,21),ncol=3,nrow=12)
>fisher.test(a,simulate.p.value=TRUE)$p.value
Number of cells in a and b are the same, but the simulation only works with matrix a.
Does anyone know if it is a statistical issue or a R issue and, if so, how it could be solved?
Thanks for your suggestions
I think that you are just seeing a very significant result. The p-value is being computed as the number of simulated (and the original) matrices that are as extreme or more extreme than the original. If none of the randomly generated matrices are as or more extreme then the p-value will just be 1 (the original matrix is as extreme as itself) divided by the total number of matrices which is $B+1$ (the B simulated and the 1 original matrix). If you run the function with enough samples (high enough B) then you will start to see some of the random matrices as or more extreme and therefor varying p-values, but the time to do so is probably not reasonable.
I am a new user of R and I try to do PCA on my data set using R. The dimension of data is 20x10000, i.e. # of features is 10000 and # of individuals is 20. It seems that prcomp() cannot handle the data exactly, because the dimension of calculated eigenvectors and new data is 20x20 and 10000x20 instead of 10000x10000 and 20x10000. I tried FactoMineR library also, but the results looked like that it looses some dimension, too. Is there any way to doing PCA on the data like this? :(
By reading the manual, it looks like no components are omitted by default but check the tol argument. The problem is with negative eigenvalues that may bet there (and often are) when you have less cases than individuals. (I think with 10000 cases and 20 individuals you will always have many negative eigenvalues.) See a simplified version of PCA I'm sometimes using that computes "PC loadings" the way they're usually used in psychology.
PCA <- function(X, cut=NULL, USE="complete.obs") {
if(is.null(cut)) cut<- ncol(X)
E<-eigen(cor(X,use=USE))
vec<-E$vectors
val<-E$values
P<-sweep(vec,2,sqrt(val),"*")[,1:cut]
P
}
The "loadings" are, basically, eigenvectors multiplied by the square root of eigenvalues -- but there's a problem here if you have negative eigenvalues. Something similar may happen with prcomp.
If you just want to reconstruct your data matrix exactly (for whatever reason), you can easily use svd or eigen directly. /My example used correlation matrix but the logic is not confined to this case./
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Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
how to generate pseudo-random positive definite matrix with constraints on the off-diagonal elements?
The user wants to impose a unique, non-trivial, upper/lower bound on the correlation between every pair of variable in a var/covar matrix.
For example: I want a variance matrix in which all variables have 0.9 > |rho(x_i,x_j)| > 0.6, rho(x_i,x_j) being the correlation between variables x_i and x_j.
Thanks.
There are MANY issues here.
First of all, are the pseudo-random deviates assumed to be normally distributed? I'll assume they are, as any discussion of correlation matrices gets nasty if we diverge into non-normal distributions.
Next, it is rather simple to generate pseudo-random normal deviates, given a covariance matrix. Generate standard normal (independent) deviates, and then transform by multiplying by the Cholesky factor of the covariance matrix. Add in the mean at the end if the mean was not zero.
And, a covariance matrix is also rather simple to generate given a correlation matrix. Just pre and post multiply the correlation matrix by a diagonal matrix composed of the standard deviations. This scales a correlation matrix into a covariance matrix.
I'm still not sure where the problem lies in this question, since it would seem easy enough to generate a "random" correlation matrix, with elements uniformly distributed in the desired range.
So all of the above is rather trivial by any reasonable standards, and there are many tools out there to generate pseudo-random normal deviates given the above information.
Perhaps the issue is the user insists that the resulting random matrix of deviates must have correlations in the specified range. You must recognize that a set of random numbers will only have the desired distribution parameters in an asymptotic sense. Thus, as the sample size goes to infinity, you should expect to see the specified distribution parameters. But any small sample set will not necessarily have the desired parameters, in the desired ranges.
For example, (in MATLAB) here is a simple positive definite 3x3 matrix. As such, it makes a very nice covariance matrix.
S = randn(3);
S = S'*S
S =
0.78863 0.01123 -0.27879
0.01123 4.9316 3.5732
-0.27879 3.5732 2.7872
I'll convert S into a correlation matrix.
s = sqrt(diag(S));
C = diag(1./s)*S*diag(1./s)
C =
1 0.0056945 -0.18804
0.0056945 1 0.96377
-0.18804 0.96377 1
Now, I can sample from a normal distribution using the statistics toolbox (mvnrnd should do the trick.) As easy is to use a Cholesky factor.
L = chol(S)
L =
0.88805 0.012646 -0.31394
0 2.2207 1.6108
0 0 0.30643
Now, generate pseudo-random deviates, then transform them as desired.
X = randn(20,3)*L;
cov(X)
ans =
0.79069 -0.14297 -0.45032
-0.14297 6.0607 4.5459
-0.45032 4.5459 3.6549
corr(X)
ans =
1 -0.06531 -0.2649
-0.06531 1 0.96587
-0.2649 0.96587 1
If your desire was that the correlations must ALWAYS be greater than -0.188, then this sampling technique has failed, since the numbers are pseudo-random. In fact, that goal will be a difficult one to achieve unless your sample size is large enough.
You might employ a simple rejection scheme, whereby you do the sampling, then redo it repeatedly until the sample has the desired properties, with the correlations in the desired ranges. This may get tiring.
An approach that might work (but one that I've not totally thought out at this point) is to use the standard scheme as above to generate a random sample. Compute the correlations. I they fail to lie in the proper ranges, then identify the perturbation one would need to make to the actual (measured) covariance matrix of your data, so that the correlations would be as desired. Now, find a zero mean random perturbation to your sampled data that would move the sample covariance matrix in the desired direction.
This might work, but unless I knew that this is actually the question at hand, I won't bother to go any more deeply into it. (Edit: I've thought some more about this problem, and it appears to be a quadratic programming problem, with quadratic constraints, to find the smallest perturbation to a matrix X, such that the resulting covariance (or correlation) matrix has the desired properties.)
This is not a complete answer, but a suggestion of a possible constructive method:
Looking at the characterizations of the positive definite matrices (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive-definite_matrix) I think one of the most affordable approaches could be using the Sylvester criterion.
You can start with a trivial 1x1 random matrix with positive determinant and expand it in one row and column step by step while ensuring that the new matrix has also a positive determinant (how to achieve that is up to you ^_^).
Woodship,
"First of all, are the pseudo-random deviates assumed to be normally distributed?"
yes.
"Perhaps the issue is the user insists that the resulting random matrix of deviates must have correlations in the specified range."
Yes, that's the whole difficulty
"You must recognize that a set of random numbers will only have the desired distribution parameters in an asymptotic sense."
True, but this is not the problem here: your strategy works for p=2, but fails for p>2, regardless of sample size.
"If your desire was that the correlations must ALWAYS be greater than -0.188, then this sampling technique has failed, since the numbers are pseudo-random. In fact, that goal will be a difficult one to achieve unless your sample size is large enough."
It is not a sample size issue b/c with p>2 you do not even observe convergence to the right range for the correlations, as sample size growths: i tried the technique you suggest before posting here, it obviously is flawed.
"You might employ a simple rejection scheme, whereby you do the sampling, then redo it repeatedly until the sample has the desired properties, with the correlations in the desired ranges. This may get tiring."
Not an option, for p large (say larger than 10) this option is intractable.
"Compute the correlations. I they fail to lie in the proper ranges, then identify the perturbation one would need to make to the actual (measured) covariance matrix of your data, so that the correlations would be as desired."
Ditto
As for the QP, i understand the constraints, but i'm not sure about the way you define the objective function; by using the "smallest perturbation" off some initial matrix, you will always end up getting the same (solution) matrix: all the off diagonal entries will be exactly equal to either one of the two bounds (e.g. not pseudo random); plus it is kind of an overkill isn't it ?
Come on people, there must be something simpler