moderndive
into
introductory linear regression with RWe present the moderndive
R package of datasets and
functions for tidyverse-friendly introductory
linear regression (Wickham, Averick, et al.
2019). These tools leverage the well-developed
tidyverse
and broom
packages to facilitate 1)
working with regression tables that include confidence intervals, 2)
accessing regression outputs on an observation level
(e.g. fitted/predicted values and residuals), 3) inspecting scalar
summaries of regression fit (e.g. R2, Radj2,
and mean squared error), and 4) visualizing parallel slopes regression
models using ggplot2
-like syntax (Wickham, Chang, et al. 2019; Robinson and Hayes
2019). This R package is designed to supplement the book
“Statistical Inference via Data Science: A ModernDive into R and the
Tidyverse” (Ismay and Kim 2019). Note that
the book is also available online at https://moderndive.com and is referred to as
“ModernDive” for short.
Linear regression has long been a staple of introductory statistics
courses. While the curricula of introductory statistics courses has much
evolved of late, the overall importance of regression remains the same
(American Statistical Association Undergraduate
Guidelines Workgroup 2016). Furthermore, while the use of the R
statistical programming language for statistical analysis is not new,
recent developments such as the tidyverse
suite of packages
have made statistical computation with R accessible to a broader
audience (Wickham, Averick, et al. 2019).
We go one step further by leveraging the tidyverse
and the
broom
packages to make linear regression accessible to
students taking an introductory statistics course (Robinson and Hayes 2019). Such students are
likely to be new to statistical computation with R; we designed
moderndive
with these students in mind.
Let’s load all the R packages we are going to need.
Let’s consider data gathered from end of semester student evaluations
for a sample of 463 courses taught by 94 professors from the University
of Texas at Austin (Diez, Barr, and
Çetinkaya-Rundel 2015). This data is included in the
evals
data frame from the moderndive
package.
In the following table, we present a subset of 9 of the 14 variables included for a random sample of 5 courses1:
ID
uniquely identifies the course whereas
prof_ID
identifies the professor who taught this course.
This distinction is important since many professors taught more than one
course.score
is the outcome variable of interest: average
professor evaluation score out of 5 as given by the students in this
course.bty_avg
(average “beauty”
score) for that professor as given by a panel of 6 students.2ID | prof_ID | score | age | bty_avg | gender | ethnicity | language | rank |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
129 | 23 | 3.7 | 62 | 3.000 | male | not minority | english | tenured |
109 | 19 | 4.7 | 46 | 4.333 | female | not minority | english | tenured |
28 | 6 | 4.8 | 62 | 5.500 | male | not minority | english | tenured |
434 | 88 | 2.8 | 62 | 2.000 | male | not minority | english | tenured |
330 | 66 | 4.0 | 64 | 2.333 | male | not minority | english | tenured |
Let’s fit a simple linear regression model of teaching
score
as a function of instructor age
using
the lm()
function.
Let’s now study the output of the fitted model
score_model
“the good old-fashioned way”: using
summary()
which calls summary.lm()
behind the
scenes (we’ll refer to them interchangeably throughout this paper).
summary(score_model)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = score ~ age, data = evals)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -1.9185 -0.3531 0.1172 0.4172 0.8825
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 4.461932 0.126778 35.195 <2e-16 ***
## age -0.005938 0.002569 -2.311 0.0213 *
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 0.5413 on 461 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.01146, Adjusted R-squared: 0.009311
## F-statistic: 5.342 on 1 and 461 DF, p-value: 0.02125
moderndive
As an improvement to base R’s regression functions, we’ve included
three functions in the moderndive
package that take a
fitted model object as input and return the same information as
summary.lm()
, but output them in tidyverse-friendly format
(Wickham, Averick, et al. 2019). As we’ll
see later, while these three functions are thin wrappers to existing
functions in the broom
package for converting statistical
objects into tidy tibbles, we modified them with the introductory
statistics student in mind (Robinson and Hayes
2019).
Get a tidy regression table with confidence intervals:
Get information on each point/observation in your regression, including fitted/predicted values and residuals, in a single data frame:
get_regression_points(score_model)
## # A tibble: 463 × 5
## ID score age score_hat residual
## <int> <dbl> <int> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 1 4.7 36 4.25 0.452
## 2 2 4.1 36 4.25 -0.148
## 3 3 3.9 36 4.25 -0.348
## 4 4 4.8 36 4.25 0.552
## 5 5 4.6 59 4.11 0.488
## 6 6 4.3 59 4.11 0.188
## 7 7 2.8 59 4.11 -1.31
## 8 8 4.1 51 4.16 -0.059
## 9 9 3.4 51 4.16 -0.759
## 10 10 4.5 40 4.22 0.276
## # ℹ 453 more rows
Get scalar summaries of a regression fit including R2 and Radj2 but also the (root) mean-squared error:
Furthermore, say you would like to create a visualization of the
relationship between two numerical variables and a third categorical
variable with k levels. Let’s
create this using a colored scatterplot via the ggplot2
package for data visualization (Wickham, Chang,
et al. 2019). Using
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = FALSE)
yields a
visualization of an interaction model where each of the k regression lines has their own
intercept and slope. For example in , we extend our previous regression
model by now mapping the categorical variable ethnicity
to
the color
aesthetic.
# Code to visualize interaction model:
ggplot(evals, aes(x = age, y = score, color = ethnicity)) +
geom_point() +
geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = FALSE) +
labs(x = "Age", y = "Teaching score", color = "Ethnicity")
However, many introductory statistics courses start with the easier
to teach “common slope, different intercepts” regression model, also
known as the parallel slopes model. However, no argument to
plot such models exists within geom_smooth()
.
Evgeni
Chasnovski thus wrote a custom geom_
extension to
ggplot2
called geom_parallel_slopes()
; this
extension is included in the moderndive
package. Much like
geom_smooth()
from the ggplot2
package, you
add geom_parallel_slopes()
as a layer to the code,
resulting in .
# Code to visualize parallel slopes model:
ggplot(evals, aes(x = age, y = score, color = ethnicity)) +
geom_point() +
geom_parallel_slopes(se = FALSE) +
labs(x = "Age", y = "Teaching score", color = "Ethnicity")
In the GitHub repository README, we present an in-depth discussion of
six features of the moderndive
package:
ggplot2
Furthermore, we discuss the inner-workings of the
moderndive
package:
broom
package in its wrappersggplot2
geometry for the
geom_parallel_slopes()
function that allows for quick
visualization of parallel slopes models in regression.Many thanks to Jenny Smetzer @smetzer180, Luke W. Johnston @lwjohnst86,
and Lisa Rosenthal @lisamr for their helpful feedback for this paper
and to Evgeni Chasnovski @echasnovski for contributing the
geom_parallel_slopes()
function via GitHub pull request. The authors do not have any financial
support to disclose.