[R] Fitting a line on trellis plot

[S Ellison]

> Call:
> lm(formula = curr_data[[tmin_col]] ~ curr_data[[year_col]] -
>     1 | curr_data[[month_col]])


First, this is not a sensible formula for lm; lm() does not use '|' to denote grouping. It would be a valid formula for xyplot, in which | specifies grouping variables. In lm(), '|' is simply being treated as 'or', which is why one of your coefficients is for ' curr_data[[year_col]]  | curr_data[[month_col]]TRUE'

Second, you should not normally need things like curr_data[[month_col]], either in lm or xyplot. If curr_data is a data frame, things like

lm(tmin ~ year, data=curr_data)
 
should work.

Third, 'nested' models in lm use the nesting operator '/', not '|'. So if you want 12 lines with separate intercept and gradient from an lm, you need (with month as a factor and the default intercept suppressed)
lm(tmin~month+year/month -1, data=curr_data) #-1 suppresses the intercept and provides a zero-based intercept for each month

This gives you 12 'month' intercepts and one gradient per month. If you wanted a common intercept you'd do 
lm(tmin~ year/month, data=curr_data)
But beware; the coefficients in both cases cannot be interpreted as a simple gradient and intercept for each month: if I recall correctly, the gradients for month2 and on are modelled as an additive increment on the first month gradient. Use predict() if you want an easy way to predict a value for a given (possibly fractional) time of year and 'month'.
[Incidentally I don’t immediately see why that is a sensible thing to do - this fits a monthly summary against a numeric year. But I'm going to assume you know what you want there.]

Finally, though, this model will not help you much with lattice as there's no _simple_ way of putting those lines on different panels in a lattice plot. If you just want a line on each of 12 panels, that's much easier. You can  use the panel() function with panel.lmline to put it there. For example, if you want to plot a line over the data, use 

xyplot(tmin~year|month, curr_data,
	panel=function(x, y, ...) {
		panel.xyplot(x, y, ...)
		panel.lmline(x, y, ...)
	}
)


S Ellison




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