Hi, I am not a statistics expert, so I have this question. A linear model gives me the following summary:
Call: lm(formula = N ~ N_alt) Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -110.30 -35.80 -22.77 38.07 122.76 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 13.5177 229.0764 0.059 0.9535 N_alt 0.2832 0.1501 1.886 0.0739 . --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 Residual standard error: 56.77 on 20 degrees of freedom (16 observations deleted due to missingness) Multiple R-squared: 0.151, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1086 F-statistic: 3.558 on 1 and 20 DF, p-value: 0.07386 The regression is not very good (high p-value, low R-squared). The Pr value for the intercept seems to indicate that it is zero with a very high probability (95.35%). So I repeat the regression forcing the intercept to zero: Call: lm(formula = N ~ N_alt - 1) Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -110.11 -36.35 -22.13 38.59 123.23 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) N_alt 0.292046 0.007742 37.72 <2e-16 *** --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 Residual standard error: 55.41 on 21 degrees of freedom (16 observations deleted due to missingness) Multiple R-squared: 0.9855, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9848 F-statistic: 1423 on 1 and 21 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16 1. Is my interpretation correct? 2. Is it possible that just by forcing the intercept to become zero, a bad regression becomes an extremely good one? 3. Why doesn't lm suggest a value of zero (or near zero) by itself if the regression is so much better with it? Please excuse my ignorance. Jan Rheinländer ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.