[R] Partial correlations and p-values

[Ista Zahn]

1) Think about what you did wrong. It doesn't make sense to do
correlation/regression with variables of different lengths. You can
have missing values in one or more variables, if that's what you mean.
Just code them NA.

2) Just add in the predictors, e.g.
residuals(lm(y ~ z1 + z2))

-Ista

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:34 PM, dadrivr <dadrivr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Awesome, that's what I was looking for.  I have two additional questions: (1)
> What can I do if the variables are of different lengths? (2) How do I update
> the formula if I want to control for more than one variable.
>
> Let's take the following example:
> x <- c(1,20,14,7,9)
> y <- c(5,6,7,9,10,11)
> z <- c(13,27,16,5,4,17,20)
> a <- c(4,6,7,1)
>
> xres <- residuals(lm(x ~ z))
> yres <- residuals(lm(y ~ z))
> cor(xres, yres)
> ct <- cor.test(xres, yres)
> ct$estimate
> ct$p.value
>
> How do I update the above formula to:
> (1) take into account that the variables are of different lengths?  I get an
> error when calculating the residuals.
> (2) control for z and a (i.e., more than one variable)?
>
> Thanks so much for your help.
>
>
> Peter Ehlers wrote:
>>
>>
>> dadrivr wrote:
>>> I'm trying to write code to calculate partial correlations (along with
>>> p-values).  I'm new to R, and I don't know how to do this.  I have
>>> searched
>>> and come across different functions, but I haven't been able to get any
>>> of
>>> them to work (for example, pcor and pcor.test from the ggm package).
>>>
>>> In the following example, I am trying to compute the correlation between
>>> x
>>> and y, while controlling for z (partial correlation):
>>>
>>> x <- c(1,20,14,7,9)
>>> y <- c(5,6,7,9,10)
>>> z <- c(13,27,16,5,4)
>>>
>>> What function can I append to this to find this partial correlation?
>>> Many
>>> thanks!
>>
>> I'm not sure what you need, but does this give you what
>> you want:
>>
>> xres <- residuals(lm(x ~ z))
>> yres <- residuals(lm(y ~ z))
>> cor(xres, yres)
>> # [1] 0.9778857
>>
>> or
>>
>> ct <- cor.test(xres, yres)
>> ct$estimate  # 0.9978857
>> ct$p.value   # 0.003934582
>>
>>   -Peter Ehlers
>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>>
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Partial-correlations-and-p-values-tp26308463p26312873.html
> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



-- 
Ista Zahn
Graduate student
University of Rochester
Department of Clinical and Social Psychology
http://yourpsyche.org