Partial regression plot

Last updated

In applied statistics, a partial regression plot attempts to show the effect of adding another variable to a model that already has one or more independent variables. Partial regression plots are also referred to as added variable plots, adjusted variable plots, and individual coefficient plots.

Contents

When performing a linear regression with a single independent variable, a scatter plot of the response variable against the independent variable provides a good indication of the nature of the relationship. If there is more than one independent variable, things become more complicated. Although it can still be useful to generate scatter plots of the response variable against each of the independent variables, this does not take into account the effect of the other independent variables in the model.

Calculation

Partial regression plots are formed by:

  1. Computing the residuals of regressing the response variable against the independent variables but omitting Xi
  2. Computing the residuals from regressing Xi against the remaining independent variables
  3. Plotting the residuals from (1) against the residuals from (2).

Velleman and Welsch [1] express this mathematically as:

where

Y•[i] = residuals from regressing Y (the response variable) against all the independent variables except Xi
Xi•[i] = residuals from regressing Xi against the remaining independent variables.

Properties

Velleman and Welsch [1] list the following useful properties for this plot:

  1. The least squares linear fit to this plot has the slope and intercept zero.
  2. The residuals from the least squares linear fit to this plot are identical to the residuals from the least squares fit of the original model (Y against all the independent variables including Xi).
  3. The influences of individual data values on the estimation of a coefficient are easy to see in this plot.
  4. It is easy to see many kinds of failures of the model or violations of the underlying assumptions (nonlinearity, heteroscedasticity, unusual patterns). .

Partial regression plots are related to, but distinct from, partial residual plots. Partial regression plots are most commonly used to identify data points with high leverage and influential data points that might not have high leverage. Partial residual plots are most commonly used to identify the nature of the relationship between Y and Xi (given the effect of the other independent variables in the model). Note that since the simple correlation between the two sets of residuals plotted is equal to the partial correlation between the response variable and Xi, partial regression plots will show the correct strength of the linear relationship between the response variable and Xi. This is not true for partial residual plots. On the other hand, for the partial regression plot, the x-axis is not Xi. This limits its usefulness in determining the need for a transformation (which is the primary purpose of the partial residual plot).

See also

Related Research Articles

Least squares Approximation method in statistics

The method of least squares is a standard approach in regression analysis to approximate the solution of overdetermined systems by minimizing the sum of the squares of the residuals made in the results of each individual equation.

Regression analysis Set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships among variables

In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. The most common form of regression analysis is linear regression, in which one finds the line that most closely fits the data according to a specific mathematical criterion. For example, the method of ordinary least squares computes the unique line that minimizes the sum of squared differences between the true data and that line. For specific mathematical reasons, this allows the researcher to estimate the conditional expectation of the dependent variable when the independent variables take on a given set of values. Less common forms of regression use slightly different procedures to estimate alternative location parameters or estimate the conditional expectation across a broader collection of non-linear models.

Nonlinear regression Regression analysis

In statistics, nonlinear regression is a form of regression analysis in which observational data are modeled by a function which is a nonlinear combination of the model parameters and depends on one or more independent variables. The data are fitted by a method of successive approximations.

In statistics, the coefficient of multiple correlation is a measure of how well a given variable can be predicted using a linear function of a set of other variables. It is the correlation between the variable's values and the best predictions that can be computed linearly from the predictive variables.

In statistics, multicollinearity is a phenomenon in which one predictor variable in a multiple regression model can be linearly predicted from the others with a substantial degree of accuracy. In this situation, the coefficient estimates of the multiple regression may change erratically in response to small changes in the model or the data. Multicollinearity does not reduce the predictive power or reliability of the model as a whole, at least within the sample data set; it only affects calculations regarding individual predictors. That is, a multivariate regression model with collinear predictors can indicate how well the entire bundle of predictors predicts the outcome variable, but it may not give valid results about any individual predictor, or about which predictors are redundant with respect to others.

Coefficient of determination Indicator for how well data points fit a line or curve

In statistics, the coefficient of determination, denoted R2 or r2 and pronounced "R squared", is the proportion of the variation in the dependent variable that is predictable from the independent variable(s).

In statistics, ordinary least squares (OLS) is a type of linear least squares method for estimating the unknown parameters in a linear regression model. OLS chooses the parameters of a linear function of a set of explanatory variables by the principle of least squares: minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observed dependent variable in the given dataset and those predicted by the linear function of the independent variable.

In statistics, the Breusch–Pagan test, developed in 1979 by Trevor Breusch and Adrian Pagan, is used to test for heteroskedasticity in a linear regression model. It was independently suggested with some extension by R. Dennis Cook and Sanford Weisberg in 1983. Derived from the Lagrange multiplier test principle, it tests whether the variance of the errors from a regression is dependent on the values of the independent variables. In that case, heteroskedasticity is present.

In statistics, the Durbin–Watson statistic is a test statistic used to detect the presence of autocorrelation at lag 1 in the residuals from a regression analysis. It is named after James Durbin and Geoffrey Watson. The small sample distribution of this ratio was derived by John von Neumann. Durbin and Watson applied this statistic to the residuals from least squares regressions, and developed bounds tests for the null hypothesis that the errors are serially uncorrelated against the alternative that they follow a first order autoregressive process. Note that the distribution of this test statistic does not depend on the estimated regression coefficients and the variance of the errors.

In probability theory and statistics, partial correlation measures the degree of association between two random variables, with the effect of a set of controlling random variables removed. If we are interested in finding to what extent there is a numerical relationship between two variables of interest, using their correlation coefficient will give misleading results if there is another, confounding, variable that is numerically related to both variables of interest. This misleading information can be avoided by controlling for the confounding variable, which is done by computing the partial correlation coefficient. This is precisely the motivation for including other right-side variables in a multiple regression; but while multiple regression gives unbiased results for the effect size, it does not give a numerical value of a measure of the strength of the relationship between the two variables of interest.

In statistics, the projection matrix, sometimes also called the influence matrix or hat matrix, maps the vector of response values to the vector of fitted values. It describes the influence each response value has on each fitted value. The diagonal elements of the projection matrix are the leverages, which describe the influence each response value has on the fitted value for that same observation.

In statistics, regression validation is the process of deciding whether the numerical results quantifying hypothesized relationships between variables, obtained from regression analysis, are acceptable as descriptions of the data. The validation process can involve analyzing the goodness of fit of the regression, analyzing whether the regression residuals are random, and checking whether the model's predictive performance deteriorates substantially when applied to data that were not used in model estimation.

In applied statistics, a partial residual plot is a graphical technique that attempts to show the relationship between a given independent variable and the response variable given that other independent variables are also in the model.

In regression analysis, partial leverage (PL) is a measure of the contribution of the individual independent variables to the total leverage of each observation. That is, if hi is the ith element of the diagonal of the hat matrix, PL is a measure of how hi changes as a variable is added to the regression model. It is computed as:

In statistics and in particular in regression analysis, leverage is a measure of how far away the independent variable values of an observation are from those of the other observations. High-leverage points, if any, are outliers with respect to the independent variables. That is, high-leverage points have no neighboring points in space, where is the number of independent variables in a regression model. This makes the fitted model likely to pass close to a high leverage observation. Hence high-leverage points have the potential to cause large changes in the parameter estimates when they are deleted i.e., to be influential points. Although an influential point will typically have high leverage, a high leverage point is not necessarily an influential point. The leverage is typically defined as the diagonal elements of the hat matrix.

In statistics, polynomial regression is a form of regression analysis in which the relationship between the independent variable x and the dependent variable y is modelled as an nth degree polynomial in x. Polynomial regression fits a nonlinear relationship between the value of x and the corresponding conditional mean of y, denoted E(y |x). Although polynomial regression fits a nonlinear model to the data, as a statistical estimation problem it is linear, in the sense that the regression function E(y | x) is linear in the unknown parameters that are estimated from the data. For this reason, polynomial regression is considered to be a special case of multiple linear regression.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to regression analysis:

Linear least squares (LLS) is the least squares approximation of linear functions to data. It is a set of formulations for solving statistical problems involved in linear regression, including variants for ordinary (unweighted), weighted, and generalized (correlated) residuals. Numerical methods for linear least squares include inverting the matrix of the normal equations and orthogonal decomposition methods.

In statistics, a regression diagnostic is one of a set of procedures available for regression analysis that seek to assess the validity of a model in any of a number of different ways. This assessment may be an exploration of the model's underlying statistical assumptions, an examination of the structure of the model by considering formulations that have fewer, more or different explanatory variables, or a study of subgroups of observations, looking for those that are either poorly represented by the model (outliers) or that have a relatively large effect on the regression model's predictions.

In statistics, linear regression is a linear approach for modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables. The case of one explanatory variable is called simple linear regression; for more than one, the process is called multiple linear regression. This term is distinct from multivariate linear regression, where multiple correlated dependent variables are predicted, rather than a single scalar variable.

References

  1. 1 2 Paul Velleman; Roy Welsch (November 1981). "Efficient Computing of Regression Diagnostics". The American Statistician. American Statistical Association. 35 (4): 234–242. doi:10.2307/2683296. JSTOR   2683296.

Further reading

PD-icon.svg This article incorporates  public domain material from the National Institute of Standards and Technology website https://www.nist.gov .