I’m usting the MASS library and the Boston housing data set. The data set has include median home values for over 500 neighborhoods in and around Boston. The example I’m using is from the book, An Introduction to Statistical Learning. I find the book very easy to understand and well organized. The authors also have a youtube course that uses the book.

Let’s get started.

First we’ll take a quick look at our data - get the variable names and data set structure.

##  [1] "crim"    "zn"      "indus"   "chas"    "nox"     "rm"      "age"    
##  [8] "dis"     "rad"     "tax"     "ptratio" "black"   "lstat"   "medv"
## 'data.frame':    506 obs. of  14 variables:
##  $ crim   : num  0.00632 0.02731 0.02729 0.03237 0.06905 ...
##  $ zn     : num  18 0 0 0 0 0 12.5 12.5 12.5 12.5 ...
##  $ indus  : num  2.31 7.07 7.07 2.18 2.18 2.18 7.87 7.87 7.87 7.87 ...
##  $ chas   : int  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
##  $ nox    : num  0.538 0.469 0.469 0.458 0.458 0.458 0.524 0.524 0.524 0.524 ...
##  $ rm     : num  6.58 6.42 7.18 7 7.15 ...
##  $ age    : num  65.2 78.9 61.1 45.8 54.2 58.7 66.6 96.1 100 85.9 ...
##  $ dis    : num  4.09 4.97 4.97 6.06 6.06 ...
##  $ rad    : int  1 2 2 3 3 3 5 5 5 5 ...
##  $ tax    : num  296 242 242 222 222 222 311 311 311 311 ...
##  $ ptratio: num  15.3 17.8 17.8 18.7 18.7 18.7 15.2 15.2 15.2 15.2 ...
##  $ black  : num  397 397 393 395 397 ...
##  $ lstat  : num  4.98 9.14 4.03 2.94 5.33 ...
##  $ medv   : num  24 21.6 34.7 33.4 36.2 28.7 22.9 27.1 16.5 18.9 ...

Visualize the Data with a scatter plot

Next we develop a simple regression of medv (median home value) to lstat (percent of households with low socioeconomic status.). I would expect the coeffient for lsat to be negative. Let’s see if that the case.

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = medv ~ lstat)
## 
## Coefficients:
## (Intercept)        lstat  
##       34.55        -0.95

The summary function can be utilized to see model results. The model yielded an intercept of 34.55 and lstat coefficient of -0.95. Both the intercept and the coefficient appear to be statistically significant.

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = medv ~ lstat)
## 
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -15.168  -3.990  -1.318   2.034  24.500 
## 
## Coefficients:
##             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept) 34.55384    0.56263   61.41   <2e-16 ***
## lstat       -0.95005    0.03873  -24.53   <2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 6.216 on 504 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.5441, Adjusted R-squared:  0.5432 
## F-statistic: 601.6 on 1 and 504 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

The predict function can create confidence intervals and prediction intervals for the prediction of medv for given values of lstat. Let’s create some confidence intervals first.

##        fit      lwr      upr
## 1 29.80359 29.00741 30.59978
## 2 25.05335 24.47413 25.63256
## 3 20.30310 19.73159 20.87461

Now for some prediction intervals:

##        fit       lwr      upr
## 1 29.80359 17.565675 42.04151
## 2 25.05335 12.827626 37.27907
## 3 20.30310  8.077742 32.52846

The plot and abline plot call in question the linear relationship between medv and lstat

We can use the residuals function directly and in a plot to take a look at the residuals. The residuals seem to become form dense with higher prediction values.

We can also take a look at the qq plots - this confirms our non-linearity concern.