Useful R tidbits: Machine Learning

r
machine learning

Tasty R snacks that do useful things in Machine Learning

Published

February 3, 2022

This document contains R snippets pertaining to work in the Machine Learning class. There is also one for the Political Networks Analysis class.

Most of this comes directly from the resources from the 2nd edition of ISLR, either direct quotes or things that build on them. The Lab section of each chapter contains useful walkthroughs and code illustrating the chapter’s key concepts, and there’s always something to learn about R and how different people use it.

Everything here is, unless otherwise marked, either the work of, or derivative of the work of, the original authors of the book.

Chapter 3: Linear Regression


Attaching package: 'ISLR2'
The following object is masked from 'package:MASS':

    Boston

names(): see the attributes of a model

names() is a nice, simple way to see the attributes of a linear model:

attach(Boston)
lm.fit <- lm(medv ~ lstat)
names(lm.fit)
 [1] "coefficients"  "residuals"     "effects"       "rank"         
 [5] "fitted.values" "assign"        "qr"            "df.residual"  
 [9] "xlevels"       "call"          "terms"         "model"        

coef(): see the model’s coefficients

coef() is a convenient way to get the coefficients attribute:

coef(lm.fit)
(Intercept)       lstat 
 34.5538409  -0.9500494 

Note: this is equivalent to lm.fit$coefficients, but slightly easier on the eyes.

confint(): see confidence intervals for a model

confint(lm.fit)
                2.5 %     97.5 %
(Intercept) 33.448457 35.6592247
lstat       -1.026148 -0.8739505

Note: levels can be added with the level parameter (the default is 0.95):

confint(lm.fit, level = 0.90)
                  5 %       95 %
(Intercept) 33.626697 35.4809847
lstat       -1.013877 -0.8862212

predict(): see confidence OR prediction intervals for a model

predict(lm.fit, data.frame(lstat = (c(5, 10, 15))),
    interval = "confidence")
       fit      lwr      upr
1 29.80359 29.00741 30.59978
2 25.05335 24.47413 25.63256
3 20.30310 19.73159 20.87461
predict(lm.fit, data.frame(lstat = (c(5, 10, 15))),
    interval = "prediction")
       fit       lwr      upr
1 29.80359 17.565675 42.04151
2 25.05335 12.827626 37.27907
3 20.30310  8.077742 32.52846

Note: prediction intervals are defined on p. 82; in brief, it is the interval in which we are \(X\)% certain that any future observation will fall.

Note: the data.frame() call in the above parameter lists produce a nifty little data frame that is used by predict to identify the column to do calculations on, and the desired levels:

data.frame(lstat = (c(5, 10, 15)))
  lstat
1     5
2    10
3    15

Note: the book uses the base R graphics:

plot(lstat, medv)
abline(lm.fit)

The tidyverse/ggplot version of this is:

library(tidyverse)
── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.2 ──
✔ ggplot2 3.3.6      ✔ purrr   0.3.5 
✔ tibble  3.1.8      ✔ dplyr   1.0.10
✔ tidyr   1.2.1      ✔ stringr 1.4.1 
✔ readr   2.1.3      ✔ forcats 0.5.2 
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
✖ dplyr::select() masks MASS::select()
ggplot(Boston, mapping = aes(x = lstat, y = medv)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_abline(intercept = coef(lm.fit)[1],
              slope = coef(lm.fit)[2])

…a bit more work, but more modern.

arranging plots in grids

The book uses base R, again, with par() and mfrow() to arrange plots:

par(mfrow = c(2, 2))
plot(lm.fit)

ggplot uses facet() to arrange plots from the same data set in grids.

Plots from different data sets need additional packages to be combined; one option is the cowplot library and the plot_grid() function.

EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE

is direct paste from the book’s sources which I have not yet written in my own words or added anything to. Stay tuned.


Alternatively, we can compute the residuals from a linear regression fit using the residuals() function. The function rstudent() will return the studentized residuals, and we can use this function to plot the residuals against the fitted values.

plot(predict(lm.fit), residuals(lm.fit))

plot(predict(lm.fit), rstudent(lm.fit))

On the basis of the residual plots, there is some evidence of non-linearity. Leverage statistics can be computed for any number of predictors using the hatvalues() function.

plot(hatvalues(lm.fit))

which.max(hatvalues(lm.fit))
375 
375 

The which.max() function identifies the index of the largest element of a vector. In this case, it tells us which observation has the largest leverage statistic.

Multiple Linear Regression

In order to fit a multiple linear regression model using least squares, we again use the lm() function. The syntax lm(y ~ x1 + x2 + x3) is used to fit a model with three predictors, x1, x2, and x3. The summary() function now outputs the regression coefficients for all the predictors.

lm.fit <- lm(medv ~ lstat + age, data = Boston)
summary(lm.fit)

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ lstat + age, data = Boston)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-15.981  -3.978  -1.283   1.968  23.158 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 33.22276    0.73085  45.458  < 2e-16 ***
lstat       -1.03207    0.04819 -21.416  < 2e-16 ***
age          0.03454    0.01223   2.826  0.00491 ** 
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 6.173 on 503 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.5513,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.5495 
F-statistic:   309 on 2 and 503 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

The Boston data set contains 12 variables, and so it would be cumbersome to have to type all of these in order to perform a regression using all of the predictors. Instead, we can use the following short-hand:

lm.fit <- lm(medv ~ ., data = Boston)
summary(lm.fit)

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ ., data = Boston)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-15.1304  -2.7673  -0.5814   1.9414  26.2526 

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  41.617270   4.936039   8.431 3.79e-16 ***
crim         -0.121389   0.033000  -3.678 0.000261 ***
zn            0.046963   0.013879   3.384 0.000772 ***
indus         0.013468   0.062145   0.217 0.828520    
chas          2.839993   0.870007   3.264 0.001173 ** 
nox         -18.758022   3.851355  -4.870 1.50e-06 ***
rm            3.658119   0.420246   8.705  < 2e-16 ***
age           0.003611   0.013329   0.271 0.786595    
dis          -1.490754   0.201623  -7.394 6.17e-13 ***
rad           0.289405   0.066908   4.325 1.84e-05 ***
tax          -0.012682   0.003801  -3.337 0.000912 ***
ptratio      -0.937533   0.132206  -7.091 4.63e-12 ***
lstat        -0.552019   0.050659 -10.897  < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 4.798 on 493 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.7343,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.7278 
F-statistic: 113.5 on 12 and 493 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

We can access the individual components of a summary object by name (type ?summary.lm to see what is available). Hence summary(lm.fit)$r.sq gives us the \(R^2\), and summary(lm.fit)$sigma gives us the RSE. The vif() function, part of the car package, can be used to compute variance inflation factors. Most VIF’s are low to moderate for this data. The car package is not part of the base R installation so it must be downloaded the first time you use it via the install.packages() function in R.

library(car)
Loading required package: carData

Attaching package: 'car'
The following object is masked from 'package:dplyr':

    recode
The following object is masked from 'package:purrr':

    some
vif(lm.fit)
    crim       zn    indus     chas      nox       rm      age      dis 
1.767486 2.298459 3.987181 1.071168 4.369093 1.912532 3.088232 3.954037 
     rad      tax  ptratio    lstat 
7.445301 9.002158 1.797060 2.870777 

What if we would like to perform a regression using all of the variables but one? For example, in the above regression output, age has a high \(p\)-value. So we may wish to run a regression excluding this predictor. The following syntax results in a regression using all predictors except age.

lm.fit1 <- lm(medv ~ . - age, data = Boston)
summary(lm.fit1)

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ . - age, data = Boston)

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-15.1851  -2.7330  -0.6116   1.8555  26.3838 

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  41.525128   4.919684   8.441 3.52e-16 ***
crim         -0.121426   0.032969  -3.683 0.000256 ***
zn            0.046512   0.013766   3.379 0.000785 ***
indus         0.013451   0.062086   0.217 0.828577    
chas          2.852773   0.867912   3.287 0.001085 ** 
nox         -18.485070   3.713714  -4.978 8.91e-07 ***
rm            3.681070   0.411230   8.951  < 2e-16 ***
dis          -1.506777   0.192570  -7.825 3.12e-14 ***
rad           0.287940   0.066627   4.322 1.87e-05 ***
tax          -0.012653   0.003796  -3.333 0.000923 ***
ptratio      -0.934649   0.131653  -7.099 4.39e-12 ***
lstat        -0.547409   0.047669 -11.483  < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 4.794 on 494 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.7343,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.7284 
F-statistic: 124.1 on 11 and 494 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Alternatively, the update() function can be used.

lm.fit1 <- update(lm.fit, ~ . - age)

Interaction Terms

It is easy to include interaction terms in a linear model using the lm() function. The syntax lstat:black tells R to include an interaction term between lstat and black. The syntax lstat * age simultaneously includes lstat, age, and the interaction term lstat\(\times\)age as predictors; it is a shorthand for lstat + age + lstat:age.

summary(lm(medv ~ lstat * age, data = Boston))

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ lstat * age, data = Boston)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-15.806  -4.045  -1.333   2.085  27.552 

Coefficients:
              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 36.0885359  1.4698355  24.553  < 2e-16 ***
lstat       -1.3921168  0.1674555  -8.313 8.78e-16 ***
age         -0.0007209  0.0198792  -0.036   0.9711    
lstat:age    0.0041560  0.0018518   2.244   0.0252 *  
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 6.149 on 502 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.5557,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.5531 
F-statistic: 209.3 on 3 and 502 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Non-linear Transformations of the Predictors

The lm() function can also accommodate non-linear transformations of the predictors. For instance, given a predictor \(X\), we can create a predictor \(X^2\) using I(X^2). The function I() is needed since the ^ has a special meaning in a formula object; wrapping as we do allows the standard usage in R, which is to raise X to the power 2. We now perform a regression of medv onto lstat and lstat^2.

lm.fit2 <- lm(medv ~ lstat + I(lstat^2))
summary(lm.fit2)

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ lstat + I(lstat^2))

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-15.2834  -3.8313  -0.5295   2.3095  25.4148 

Coefficients:
             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) 42.862007   0.872084   49.15   <2e-16 ***
lstat       -2.332821   0.123803  -18.84   <2e-16 ***
I(lstat^2)   0.043547   0.003745   11.63   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 5.524 on 503 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.6407,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.6393 
F-statistic: 448.5 on 2 and 503 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

The near-zero \(p\)-value associated with the quadratic term suggests that it leads to an improved model. We use the anova() function to further quantify the extent to which the quadratic fit is superior to the linear fit.

lm.fit <- lm(medv ~ lstat)
anova(lm.fit, lm.fit2)
Analysis of Variance Table

Model 1: medv ~ lstat
Model 2: medv ~ lstat + I(lstat^2)
  Res.Df   RSS Df Sum of Sq     F    Pr(>F)    
1    504 19472                                 
2    503 15347  1    4125.1 135.2 < 2.2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Here Model 1 represents the linear submodel containing only one predictor, lstat, while Model 2 corresponds to the larger quadratic model that has two predictors, lstat and lstat^2. The anova() function performs a hypothesis test comparing the two models. The null hypothesis is that the two models fit the data equally well, and the alternative hypothesis is that the full model is superior. Here the \(F\)-statistic is \(135\) and the associated \(p\)-value is virtually zero. This provides very clear evidence that the model containing the predictors lstat and lstat^2 is far superior to the model that only contains the predictor lstat. This is not surprising, since earlier we saw evidence for non-linearity in the relationship between medv and lstat. If we type

par(mfrow = c(2, 2))
plot(lm.fit2)

then we see that when the lstat^2 term is included in the model, there is little discernible pattern in the residuals.

In order to create a cubic fit, we can include a predictor of the form I(X^3). However, this approach can start to get cumbersome for higher-order polynomials. A better approach involves using the poly() function to create the polynomial within lm(). For example, the following command produces a fifth-order polynomial fit:

lm.fit5 <- lm(medv ~ poly(lstat, 5))
summary(lm.fit5)

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ poly(lstat, 5))

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-13.5433  -3.1039  -0.7052   2.0844  27.1153 

Coefficients:
                 Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)       22.5328     0.2318  97.197  < 2e-16 ***
poly(lstat, 5)1 -152.4595     5.2148 -29.236  < 2e-16 ***
poly(lstat, 5)2   64.2272     5.2148  12.316  < 2e-16 ***
poly(lstat, 5)3  -27.0511     5.2148  -5.187 3.10e-07 ***
poly(lstat, 5)4   25.4517     5.2148   4.881 1.42e-06 ***
poly(lstat, 5)5  -19.2524     5.2148  -3.692 0.000247 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 5.215 on 500 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.6817,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.6785 
F-statistic: 214.2 on 5 and 500 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

This suggests that including additional polynomial terms, up to fifth order, leads to an improvement in the model fit! However, further investigation of the data reveals that no polynomial terms beyond fifth order have significant \(p\)-values in a regression fit.

By default, the poly() function orthogonalizes the predictors: this means that the features output by this function are not simply a sequence of powers of the argument. However, a linear model applied to the output of the poly() function will have the same fitted values as a linear model applied to the raw polynomials (although the coefficient estimates, standard errors, and p-values will differ). In order to obtain the raw polynomials from the poly() function, the argument raw = TRUE must be used.

Of course, we are in no way restricted to using polynomial transformations of the predictors. Here we try a log transformation.

summary(lm(medv ~ log(rm), data = Boston))

Call:
lm(formula = medv ~ log(rm), data = Boston)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-19.487  -2.875  -0.104   2.837  39.816 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)  -76.488      5.028  -15.21   <2e-16 ***
log(rm)       54.055      2.739   19.73   <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 6.915 on 504 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.4358,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.4347 
F-statistic: 389.3 on 1 and 504 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Qualitative Predictors

We will now examine the Carseats data, which is part of the ISLR2 library. We will attempt to predict Sales (child car seat sales) in \(400\) locations based on a number of predictors.

head(Carseats)
  Sales CompPrice Income Advertising Population Price ShelveLoc Age Education
1  9.50       138     73          11        276   120       Bad  42        17
2 11.22       111     48          16        260    83      Good  65        10
3 10.06       113     35          10        269    80    Medium  59        12
4  7.40       117    100           4        466    97    Medium  55        14
5  4.15       141     64           3        340   128       Bad  38        13
6 10.81       124    113          13        501    72       Bad  78        16
  Urban  US
1   Yes Yes
2   Yes Yes
3   Yes Yes
4   Yes Yes
5   Yes  No
6    No Yes

The Carseats data includes qualitative predictors such as shelveloc, an indicator of the quality of the shelving location—that is, the space within a store in which the car seat is displayed—at each location. The predictor shelveloc takes on three possible values: Bad, Medium, and Good. Given a qualitative variable such as shelveloc, R generates dummy variables automatically. Below we fit a multiple regression model that includes some interaction terms.

lm.fit <- lm(Sales ~ . + Income:Advertising + Price:Age, 
    data = Carseats)
summary(lm.fit)

Call:
lm(formula = Sales ~ . + Income:Advertising + Price:Age, data = Carseats)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-2.9208 -0.7503  0.0177  0.6754  3.3413 

Coefficients:
                     Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)         6.5755654  1.0087470   6.519 2.22e-10 ***
CompPrice           0.0929371  0.0041183  22.567  < 2e-16 ***
Income              0.0108940  0.0026044   4.183 3.57e-05 ***
Advertising         0.0702462  0.0226091   3.107 0.002030 ** 
Population          0.0001592  0.0003679   0.433 0.665330    
Price              -0.1008064  0.0074399 -13.549  < 2e-16 ***
ShelveLocGood       4.8486762  0.1528378  31.724  < 2e-16 ***
ShelveLocMedium     1.9532620  0.1257682  15.531  < 2e-16 ***
Age                -0.0579466  0.0159506  -3.633 0.000318 ***
Education          -0.0208525  0.0196131  -1.063 0.288361    
UrbanYes            0.1401597  0.1124019   1.247 0.213171    
USYes              -0.1575571  0.1489234  -1.058 0.290729    
Income:Advertising  0.0007510  0.0002784   2.698 0.007290 ** 
Price:Age           0.0001068  0.0001333   0.801 0.423812    
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Residual standard error: 1.011 on 386 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.8761,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.8719 
F-statistic:   210 on 13 and 386 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

The contrasts() function returns the coding that R uses for the dummy variables.

attach(Carseats)
contrasts(ShelveLoc)
       Good Medium
Bad       0      0
Good      1      0
Medium    0      1

Use ?contrasts to learn about other contrasts, and how to set them.

R has created a ShelveLocGood dummy variable that takes on a value of 1 if the shelving location is good, and 0 otherwise. It has also created a ShelveLocMedium dummy variable that equals 1 if the shelving location is medium, and 0 otherwise. A bad shelving location corresponds to a zero for each of the two dummy variables. The fact that the coefficient for ShelveLocGood in the regression output is positive indicates that a good shelving location is associated with high sales (relative to a bad location). And ShelveLocMedium has a smaller positive coefficient, indicating that a medium shelving location is associated with higher sales than a bad shelving location but lower sales than a good shelving location.