[R] Which columns give rise to linear dependency?

[Michael Dewey]

Short version

If I have a data frame X and I suspect
that there is a dependency between
the columns how do I confirm that,
and how do I tell which subset of columns
is involved?

==================================

Long version

A colleague had been trying to use
the SPSS RELIABILITY procedure.
It told her that the determinant of the
matrix was small. She asked me what that meant
and I told her that one of her variables was a 
linear combination of others.
I agreed to investigate further and imported
the datasets into R. The rows of each X represent
people, and the columns items. The x_{ij} are binary (coded
0/1). Three of the datasets gave the
error message from SPSS. I confirmed that
the matrix involved was indeed var(X)
and that det(var(X)) agreed with SPSS.
What I thought was that I would find
that the smallest eigenvalues would
be zero, but in two of the datasets that was not true.
In the third dataset I traced the problem quickly
to a pair of items which were 
perfectly correlated.

1 I suspect that det(var(X)) is a poor test of
  whether X is of reduced rank. I have also looked at kappa(X)
  which gives values of 10 and 17 for the two offending scales, 
  but I have no feel for whether that is high (bad?).
2 I thought that by doing svd(X) and then
  examining V I could answer my problem.
  However the elements of V, specifically
  the last column, did not show what I 
  hoped: most values effectively
  zero and the rest adding to zero.
  This did work for the third dataset though.
3 I think that SPSS was trying to invert
  var(X) in order to compute the multiple
  correlation of each item with the others.
  Is there any neat way of doing that in R?

I am using 1.5.1 on Windows 98 if that makes
a difference.

If anyone wants to look at one of the datasets
I have her permission to make it available.
Point your browser at http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk/r.html
     

Michael Dewey
michael.dewey at nottingham.ac.uk
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~mhzmd/home.html



-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._