The start value generation code in polr is also known to fail quite
frequently. For example, against the Iris data as recently posted to this
list by blackscorpio ( Sep 6, 2010).
> polr(Species~Sepal_Length+Sepal_Width+Petal_Length+Petal_Width,data=iris)
Error in polr(Species ~ Sepal_Length + Sepal_Width + Petal_Length +
Petal_Width, :
attempt to find suitable starting values failed
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In glm.fit(X, y1, wt, family = binomial(), offset = offset) :
algorithm did not converge
2: In glm.fit(X, y1, wt, family = binomial(), offset = offset) :
fitted probabilities numerically 0 or 1 occurred
I suggest that simply setting the coefficients beta to zero and the
cutpoints zeta to sensible values will always produce a feasible starting
point for non-pathological data. Here is my code that does this:
if(missing(start)) {
# try something that should always work -tjb
u <- as.integer(table(y))
u <- (cumsum(u)/sum(u))[1:q]
zetas <-
switch(method,
"logistic"= qlogis(u),
"probit"= qnorm(u),
"cauchit"= qcauchy(u),
"cloglog"= -log(-log(u)) )
s0 <- c(rep(0,pc),zetas[1],log(diff(zetas)))
Using this start code the problem is not manifested.
> source('fixed-polr.R')
> polr(Species~Sepal_Length+Sepal_Width+Petal_Length+Petal_Width,data=iris)
Call:
polr(formula = Species ~ Sepal_Length + Sepal_Width + Petal_Length +
Petal_Width, data = iris)
Coefficients:
Sepal_Length Sepal_Width Petal_Length Petal_Width
-2.466724 -6.671515 9.431689 18.270058
Intercepts:
setosa|versicolor versicolor|virginica
4.080189 42.639320
Residual Deviance: 11.89857
AIC: 23.89857
My change would also likely fix the problem reported by Kevin Coombes on May
6, 2010.
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