It does help if you read the help information for poly. > ?poly > x <- 1:3 > y <- c(1, 4, 9) > f <- lm(y ~ poly(x, 2, raw = TRUE)) ## note raw = TRUE > coef(f) (Intercept) poly(x, 2, raw = TRUE)1 poly(x, 2, raw = TRUE)2 0 0 1 >
You were assuming a power basis for the polynomial, 1, x, x^2. If you want to use that you must declare that using raw = TRUE. The default is to use an orthogonal polynomial basis, and you can expect the coefficients relative to that to be, well, puzzling. Bill Venables CSIRO Laboratories PO Box 120, Cleveland, 4163 AUSTRALIA Office Phone (email preferred): +61 7 3826 7251 Fax (if absolutely necessary): +61 7 3826 7304 Mobile: +61 4 8819 4402 Home Phone: +61 7 3286 7700 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cmis.csiro.au/bill.venables/ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Firas Swidan, PhD Sent: Friday, 7 March 2008 6:16 PM To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: [R] Puzzling coefficients for linear fitting to polynom Hi, I can not comprehend the linear fitting results of polynoms. For example, given the following data (representing y = x^2): > x <- 1:3 > y <- c(1, 4, 9) performing a linear fit > f <- lm(y ~ poly(x, 2)) gives weird coefficients: > coefficients(f) (Intercept) poly(x, 2)1 poly(x, 2)2 4.6666667 5.6568542 0.8164966 However the fitted() result makes sense: > fitted(f) 1 2 3 1 4 9 This is very confusing. How should one understand the result of coefficients()? Thanks for any tips, Firas. -- Firas Swidan, PhD Founder and CEO Olymons: Blessing Machines with Vision (TM) http://www.olymons.com P.O.Box 8125 Nazareth 16480 Israel Cell: +.972.(0)54.733.1788 ______________________________________________ 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. ______________________________________________ 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.