How to Calculate a Partial Correlation Coefficient in R: An Example with Oxidizing Ammonia to Make Nitric Acid

Introduction

Today, I will talk about the math behind calculating partial correlation and illustrate the computation in R.  The computation uses an example involving the oxidation of ammonia to make nitric acid, and this example comes from a built-in data set in R called stackloss.

I read Pages 234-237 in Section 6.6 of “Discovering Statistics Using R” by Andy Field, Jeremy Miles, and Zoe Field to learn about partial correlation.  They used a data set called “Exam Anxiety.dat” available from their companion web site (look under “6 Correlation”) to illustrate this concept; they calculated the partial correlation coefficient between exam anxiety and revision time while controlling for exam score.  As I discuss further below, the plot between the 2 above residuals helps to illustrate the calculation of partial correlation coefficients.  This plot makes intuitive sense; if you take more time to study for an exam, you tend to have less exam anxiety, so there is a negative correlation between revision time and exam anxiety.

They used a function called pcor() in a package called “ggm”; however, I suspect that this package is no longer working properly, because it depends on a deprecated package called “RBGL” (i.e. “RBGL” is no longer available in CRAN).  See this discussion thread for further information.  Thus, I wrote my own R function to illustrate partial correlation.

Partial correlation is the correlation between 2 random variables while holding other variables constant.  To calculate the partial correlation between X and Y while holding Z constant (or controlling for the effect of Z, or averaging out Z),

Checking for Normality with Quantile Ranges and the Standard Deviation

Introduction

I was reading Michael Trosset’s “An Introduction to Statistical Inference and Its Applications with R”, and I learned a basic but interesting fact about the normal distribution’s interquartile range and standard deviation that I had not learned before.  This turns out to be a good way to check for normality in a data set.

In this post, I introduce several traditional ways of checking for normality (or goodness of fit in general), talk about the method that I learned from Trosset’s book, then build upon this method by possibly coming up with a new way to check for normality.  I have not fully established this idea, so I welcome your thoughts and ideas.