[R] partial correlation coefficients in R?

[John Fox]

At 11:34 AM 2/25/2000 +0100, you wrote:

>after thorough searching of the R help files as well as S+-help, I'm coming
>to the list: Is there a possibility to compute partial correlation
>coefficients between multiple variables (correlation between two paired
>samples with the "effects of all other  variables partialled out")? All I
>seem to find are the standard Pearson correlation coefficients (with cor())
>and no clue as to how to convert them into partial ones. One of my books
>states that"this is a computionally intensive problem and computer help is
>most welcome" :-), but fails to give an algorithm. Can anyone help? Maybe
>this feature already exists somewhere?
>

Dear Kaspar,

Actually, this is quite straightforward. Suppose that R is the correlation matrix among the variables. Then,

	Rinv<-solve(R)
	D<-diag(1/sqrt(diag(Rinv)))
	P<- -D %*% Rinv %*% D

The off-diagonal elements of P are then the partial correlations between each pair of variables "partialed" for the others. (Why one would want to do this is another question.)

I hope that this helps,
 John



|----------------------------------------------------|
| John Fox                          jfox at McMaster.ca |
| Department of Sociology        McMaster University |
|----------------------------------------------------|
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