[R] Plot different regression models on one graph

kMan kchamberln at gmail.com
Sun Feb 14 23:51:08 CET 2010


I would use all of the data. If you want to "drop" one, control for it in
the model & sacrifice a degree of freedom.

Why the call to poly() by the way?

KeithC.

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Ehlers [mailto:ehlers at ucalgary.ca] 
Sent: Saturday, February 13, 2010 1:35 PM
To: David Winsemius
Cc: Rhonda Reidy; r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] Plot different regression models on one graph

Rhonda:

As David points out, a cubic fit is rather speculative. I think that one
needs to distinguish two situations: 1) theoretical justification for a
cubic model is available, or 2) you're dredging the data for the "best" fit.
Your case is the second. That puts you in the realm of EDA (exploratory data
analysis). You're free to fit any model you wish, but you should assess the
value of the model. One convenient way is to use the influence.measures()
function, which will show that points 9 and 10 in your data have a strong
influence on your cubic fit (as, of course, your eyes would tell you). A
good thing to do at this point is to fit 3 more cubic models:
1) omitting point 9, 2) omitting point 10, 3) omitting both.

Try it and plot the resulting fits. You may be surprised.

Conclusion: Without more data, you can conclude nothing about a
non-straightline fit.

(And this hasn't even addressed the relative abundance of x=0 data.)

  -Peter Ehlers

David Winsemius wrote:
> 
> On Feb 13, 2010, at 1:35 PM, Rhonda Reidy wrote:
> 
>> The following variables have the following significant relationships 
>> (x is the explanatory variable): linear, cubic, exponential, logistic.
>> The linear relationship plots without any trouble.
>>
>> Cubic is the 'best' model, but it is not plotting as a smooth curve 
>> using the following code:
>>
>> cubic.lm<- lm(y~poly(x,3))
> 
> Try:
> 
> lines(0:80, predict(cubic.lm, data.frame(x=0:80)),lwd=2)
> 
> But I really must say the superiority of that relationship over a 
> linear one is far from convincing to my eyes. Seems to be caused by 
> one data point. I hope the quotes around "best" mean tha tyou have the
same qualms.
> 
> 
>> lines(x,predict(cubic.lm),lwd=2)
>>
>> How do I plot the data and the estimated curves for all of these 
>> regression models in the same plot?
>>
>> x <- c(62.5,68.5,0,52,0,52,0,52,23.5,86,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0)
>>
>> y <-
>> c(0.054,0.055,0.017,0.021,0.020,0.028,0.032,0.073,0.076,0.087,0.042,0
>> .042,0.041,0.045,0.021,0.018,0.017,0.018,0.028,0.022)
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance.
>>
>> Rhonda Reidy
>>

--
Peter Ehlers
University of Calgary



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