On Fri, 11 Jun 2010, Christos Argyropoulos wrote:
Goodmorning,
This is a documentation related question about the B-spline function in R.
In the help file it is stated that:
"df degrees of freedom; one can specify df rather than knots; bs() then
chooses df-degree-1 knots at suitable quantiles of x (which will ignore
missing values)."
Not in R 2.11.1 where help("bs") says:
df degrees of freedom; one can specify df rather than knots; bs()
then chooses df-degree (minus one if there is an intercept)
knots at suitable quantiles of x (which will ignore missing
values).
So if one were to specify a spline with 6 degrees of freedom (and no intercept)
then a basis with 6-3-1 =2 internal knots should be created. However this is
not what happens:
library(splines)
s1<-bs(women$height, df = 6,deg=3)
s2<-bs(women$height, df = 6,deg=2)
attributes(s1)$knots
25% 50% 75%
61.5 65.0 68.5
attributes(s2)$knots
20% 40% 60% 80%
60.8 63.6 66.4 69.2
i.e. basis is created with an extra knot i.e. bs() chooses df-degree internal
knots
The documentation of "ns" states that: " .... ns() then chooses df - 1 -
intercept knots ..." suggesting that the spline functions create the
basis with df-degree internal knots if no intercept is specified but
df-degree-1 internal knots if the caller explicitly asks for an
intercept.
If you knew that 1 - TRUE == 0, then you know that is what it says.
s1<-bs(women$height, df = 6,deg=3,intercept=T)
s2<-bs(women$height, df = 6,deg=2,intercept=T)
attributes(s1)$knots
33.33333% 66.66667%
62.66667 67.33333
attributes(s2)$knots
25% 50% 75%
61.5 65.0 68.5
Is it possible to change the documentation of these functions to reflect
their actual behaviour. For example something like the following: "df
degrees of freedom; one can specify df rather than knots; bs() then
chooses df-degree-1 knots at suitable quantiles of x (which will ignore
missing values) if the intercept argument is TRUE and df-degree if
intercept=FALSE."
R-devel is where you post stuff like this, but be sure to refer to current
versions to avoid being flamed for non-compliance with posting guidelines.
HTH,
Chuck
Christos Argyropoulos
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Charles C. Berry (858) 534-2098
Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cbe...@tajo.ucsd.edu UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/ La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901
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