dhinds at sonic.net
2011-Aug-04 02:01 UTC
[R] Question about contrasts and interpreting glm output for factors
I'm fitting a logistic regression model of the form: outcome ~ covariates + A*B where A and B are factors -- A has 4 levels, B has 2 levels. The A and B term each have significant main effects and the interaction term is significant. I'd like to ask, how does a particular set of A and B values affect the predicted outcome, compared to the mean prediction across all levels. The design is unbalanced but is essentially a random sample of the underlying population, at least with respect to A and B. So I think what I'm asking for are contrasts for each combination of A and B, against a weighted sum of regression coefficients for all values of A and B. I'm currently doing this with the 'rms' package using things like: contrast(model, list(A=a0,B=b0),list(A=levels(A),B=levels(B)), type='average', weights=as.data.frame(table(A,B))$Freq) where a0 is a particular level of A, and b0 is a level of B. Is this a reasonable thing to do? The results are fairly consistent with what I get if I fit models where I replace the A*B term with a indicator for a particular combination of levels of A and B, like I(A==a0 & B==b0), and use the Wald test on that term. Any suggestions for good information sources for using complex contrasts would also be appreciated; I haven't found a great one so far. -- Dave