rcL: Fitting Row-Column Association Models With Layer Effect

Description

Fit log-multiplicative row-column association models with layer effect, also called RC(M)-L models, with one or several dimensions. Supported variants include homogeneous or heterogeneous scores over the layer variable, and (for square tables) symmetric (homogeneous) row and column scores, possibly combined with separate diagonal parameters.

Usage

rcL(tab, nd = 1,
    layer.effect = c("homogeneous.scores", "heterogeneous", "none"),
    symmetric = FALSE,
    diagonal = c("none", "heterogeneous", "homogeneous"),
    weighting = c("marginal", "uniform", "none"),
    se = c("none", "jackknife", "bootstrap"),
    nreplicates = 100, ncpus = getOption("boot.ncpus"),
    family = poisson, weights = NULL,
    start = NULL, etastart = NULL, tolerance = 1e-8,
    iterMax = 5000, eliminate=NULL,
    trace = FALSE, verbose = TRUE, ...)

Arguments

tab

a three-way table, or an object (such as a matrix) that can be coerced into a table; if present, dimensions above three will be collapsed.

the number of dimensions to include in the model. Cannot exceed min(nrow(tab) - 1, ncol(tab) - 1) if symmetric is FALSE (saturated model), and twice this threshold otherwise (quasi-symmetry model).

layer.effect

determines the form of the interaction between row-column association and layers. See “Details” below.

symmetric

should row and column scores be constrained to be equal? Valid only for square tables.

diagonal

what type of diagonal-specific parameters to include in the model, if any. This amounts to taking quasi-conditional independence, rather than conditional independence, as the baseline model. Valid only for square tables.

weighting

what weights should be used when normalizing the scores.

which method to use to compute standard errors for parameters.

nreplicates

the number of bootstrap replicates, if enabled.

ncpus

the number of processes to use for jackknife or bootstrap parallel computing. Defaults to the number of cores (see detectCores), with a maximum of 5, but falls back to 1 (no parallelization) if package parallel is not available.

family

a specification of the error distribution and link function to be used in the model. This can be a character string naming a family function; a family function, or the result of a call to a family function. See family details of family functions.

weights

an optional vector of weights to be used in the fitting process.

start

either NA to use optimal starting values, NULL to use random starting values, or a vector of starting values for the parameters in the model.

etastart

starting values for the linear predictor; set to NULL to use either default starting values (if start = NA), or random starting values (in all other cases).

tolerance

a positive numeric value specifying the tolerance level for convergence; higher values will speed up the fitting process, but beware of numerical instability of estimated scores!

iterMax

a positive integer specifying the maximum number of main iterations to perform; consider raising this value if your model does not converge.

eliminate

either NULL (the default) to estimate all parameters, NA to skip the estimation of some parameters for increased efficiency, or the name of a factor to be passed as gnm's corresponding argument.

trace

a logical value indicating whether the deviance should be printed after each iteration.

verbose

a logical value indicating whether progress indicators should be printed, including a diagnostic error message if the algorithm restarts.

…

more arguments to be passed to gnm

Value

A rcL object, with all the components of a gnm object, plus an assoc component holding the most relevant association information:

phi

The intrisic association parameters, one per dimension and per layer.

row

Row scores, normalized so that their (weighted) sum is 0, their (weighted) sum of squares is 1, and their (weighted) cross-dimensional correlation is null.

col

Column scores, normalized so that their (weighted) sum is 0, their (weighted) sum of squares is 1, and their (weighted) cross-dimensional correlation is null.

weighting

The name of the weighting method used, reflected by row.weights and col.weights.

row.weights

The row weights used for the identification of scores, as specified by the weighting argument.

col.weights

The column weights used for the identification of scores, as specified by the weighting argument.

covmat

The variance-covariance matrix for phi coefficients and normalized row and column scores. Only present if se was not “none”.

adj.covmats

An array stacking on its third dimension one variance-covariance matrix for the adjusted scores of each layer in the model (used for plotting). Only present if se was not “none”.

covtype

The method used to compute the variance-covariance matrix (corresponding to the se argument.

Details

This function fits log-multiplicative row-column association models with layer effect, usually called (after Wong) RC(M)-L models, typically following the equation: $$ log F_{ijk} = \lambda + \lambda^I_i + \lambda^J_j + \lambda^K_k + \lambda^{IK}_{ik} + \lambda^{JK}_{jk} + \sum_{m=1}^M { \phi_{mk} \mu_{imk} \nu_{jmk} } $$ where $F_{ijk}$ is the expected frequency for the cell at the intersection of row i, column j and layer k of tab, and M the number of dimensions. If layer.effect is set to ‘heterogeneous’, different scores will be computed for each level, which is equivalent to fitting separate RC(M) models on the k two-way tables. If it is set to ‘homogeneous.scores’, then $\mu_{imk} = \mu_{mk}$ and $\nu_{imk} = \nu_{im}$ for all layers k: only the $\phi_{mk}$ are allowed to vary across layers. If it is set to ‘none’, then in addition to the previous conditions all $\phi_{mk}$ are forced to be equal for all layers k, which amounts to a stability of the association across layers. See references for detailed information about the variants of the model, the degrees of freedom and the identification constraints applied to the scores.

Actual model fitting is performed using gnm, which implements the Newton-Raphson algorithm. This function simply ensures correct start values are used, in addition to allowing for identification of scores even with several dimensions, computation of their jackknife or bootstrap standard errors, and plotting. The default starting values for association parameters are computed using a singular/eigen value decomposition from the results of the model without association component (“base model”). In some complex cases, using start = NULL to start with random values can be more efficient, but it is also less stable and can converge to non-optimal solutions.

References

Wong, R.S-K. (2010). Association models. SAGE: Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences.

Examples

Run this code

# NOT RUN {
  ## Becker & Clogg (1989), Table 5 (p. 145)
  # See also ?rc for more details
  
# }
# NOT RUN {
  data(color)

  # "Uniform weights" in the authors' terms mean "no weighting" for us,
  # and "average marginals" means "marginal" with rcL
  # See ?rc for "marginals"
  unweighted <- rcL(color, nd=2, weighting="none",
                    layer.effect="heterogeneous", se="jackknife")
  marginal <- rcL(color, nd=2, weighting="marginal",
                  layer.effect="heterogeneous", se="jackknife")
  unweighted
  marginal

  # (our standard errors are much smaller for the marginal-weighted case)
  summary(unweighted)
  summary(marginal)

  opar <- par(mfrow=c(1, 2))
  plot(marginal, layer="Caithness", conf.int=0.95)
  plot(marginal, layer="Aberdeen", conf.int=0.95)
  par(opar)
  
# }
# NOT RUN {

  ## Wong (2010), Table 4.6 (p. 103), model 9
  
# }
# NOT RUN {
  data(gss7590)

  model <- rcL(gss7590, nd=2, weighting="none", se="jackknife")

  model
  summary(model) # Jackknife standard errors are slightly different
                 # from their asymptotic counterparts

  # See ?plot.rcL for plotting
  
# }

Run the code above in your browser using DataCamp Workspace