Eric’s Enlightenment for Friday, May 1, 2015

1. PROC GLIMMIX Contrasted with Other SAS Statistical Procedures for Regression (including GENMOD, MIXED, NLMIXED, LOGISTIC and CATMOD).
2. Lee-Ping Wang et al. recently developed the nanoreactor, “a computer model that can not only determine all the possible products of the Urey-Miller experiment, but also detail all the possible chemical reactions that lead to their formation”.  What an exciting development!  It “incorporates physics and machine learning to discover all the possible ways that your chemicals might react, and that might include reactions or mechanisms we’ve never seen before”.  Here is the original paper.
3. A Quora thread on the best examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences
4. In a 2-minute video, Alex Tabarrok argues why software patents should be eliminated.

Performing Logistic Regression in R and SAS

Introduction

My statistics education focused a lot on normal linear least-squares regression, and I was even told by a professor in an introductory statistics class that 95% of statistical consulting can be done with knowledge learned up to and including a course in linear regression.  Unfortunately, that advice has turned out to vastly underestimate the variety and depth of problems that I have encountered in statistical consulting, and the emphasis on linear regression has not paid dividends in my statistics career so far.  Wisdom from veteran statisticians and my own experience combine to suggest that logistic regression is actually much more commonly used in industry than linear regression.  I have already started a series of short lessons on binary classification in my Statistics Lesson of the Day and Machine Learning Lesson of the Day.    In this post, I will show how to perform logistic regression in both R and SAS.  I will discuss how to interpret the results in a later post.

The Data Set

The data set that I will use is slightly modified from Michael Brannick’s web page that explains logistic regression.  I copied and pasted the data from his web page into Excel, modified the data to create a new data set, then saved it as an Excel spreadsheet called heart attack.xlsx.

• In R, I imported it using the “XLConnect” package.
• In SAS, I imported it using PROC IMPORT.

This data set has 3 variables (I have renamed them for convenience in my R programming).

1. ha2  – Whether or not a patient had a second heart attack.  If ha2 = 1, then the patient had a second heart attack; otherwise, if ha2 = 0, then the patient did not have a second heart attack.  This is the response variable.
2. treatment – Whether or not the patient completed an anger control treatment program.
3. anxiety – A continuous variable that scores the patient’s anxiety level.  A higher score denotes higher anxiety.

Read the rest of this post to get the full scripts and view the full outputs of this logistic regression model in both R and SAS!