[R] ANCOVA for linear regressions without intercept

Yusuke Fukuda Yusuke.Fukuda at nt.gov.au
Thu Mar 31 08:42:46 CEST 2011


Hello R experts

I have two linear regressions for sexes (Male, Female, Unknown). All have a good correlation between body length (response variable) and head length (explanatory variable). I know it is not recommended, but for a good practical reason (the purpose of study is to find a single conversion factor from head length to body length), the regressions need to go through the origin (0 intercept). 

Is it possible to do ANCOVA for these regressions without intercepts? When I do

summary(lm(body length ~ sex*head length))

this will include the intercepts as below


Coefficients:
                       Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)            -6.49697    1.68497  -3.856 0.000118 ***
sexMale                -9.39340    1.97760  -4.750 2.14e-06 ***
sexUnknown             -1.33791    2.35453  -0.568 0.569927    
head_length             7.12307    0.05503 129.443  < 2e-16 ***
sexMale:head_length     0.31631    0.06246   5.064 4.37e-07 ***
sexUnknown:head_length  0.19937    0.07022   2.839 0.004556 ** 
--- 

Is there any way I can remove the intercepts so that I can simply compare the slopes with no intercept taken into account?

Thanks for help in advance.

Yusuke Fukuda



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