[R] reference for logistic regression

Douglas Bates
Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:10:39 -0000

On 10/11/07, darteta001 at ikasle.ehu.es <darteta001 at ikasle.ehu.es>
wrote:
> Dear list, first accept my apologies for asking a non-R question.

> Can anyone point me to a good reference on logistic regression? web or
> book references would be great. I am interested in the use and
> interpretation of dummy variables and prediction models.
> I checked the contributed section in the CRAN homepage but could not
> find anything (Julian Faraway?s "practical Regression and ANOVA using
> R" does not cover logistic regression)

The wikipedia article on logistic regression
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_regression) contains a brief
description and some references.  Statisticians often consider
logistic regression to be an example of a more general class of models
called generalized linear models, which is why the R function to fit a
logistic regression model is called glm.  There is a link in the
logistic regression wikipedia article to the generalized linear model
article.

Whenever you use wikipedia you should be cautious of the quality of
the information in the articles.  Generally the articles are good as a
brief introduction but they can and do contain errors so you should
check important facts and not take them at face value.  A person in
one of my classes asked about the standard deviation and I suggested
that they look at the wikipedia article on the topic.  Then I looked
at it myself and saw that one of the things mentioned is that the
standard deviation of the Cauchy distribution is undefined, which is
true, but the reason given is because E[X] is undefined, which is not
true.