# 19.2. Inference for Multiple Linear Regression¶

In linear regression, we fit a model of the following form:

\begin{split} \begin{aligned} f_\boldsymbol\theta (\textbf{x}) &= \boldsymbol\theta \cdot \textbf{x} \\ &= \theta_0 + \theta_1 x_1 + \ldots + \theta_p x_p \end{aligned} \end{split}

This model says that our prediction $$f_\boldsymbol\theta (\textbf{x})$$ depends linearly on each feature $$x_i$$.

Now, we’d like to generalize the model from the sample to the population. The key idea is to treat our data as random draws from the population. Then, we can use bootstrap resampling to simulate drawing multiple samples. We’ll fit the model on each resample, make confidence intervals for the model parameters, and use the confidence intervals to make inferences about the population. Let’s see this process through an example.

## 19.2.1. The Data¶

Otis Dudley Duncan was a quantitative sociologist interested in measuring the prestige levels of different occupations. There were only 90 occupations that were rated for their prestige level in the 1947 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey. Duncan wanted to “fill in” prestige scores for unrated occupations by using income and education data about each occupation recorded by the 1950 census. When joining the NORC data with the 1950 census data, only 45 occupations could be matched. Ultimately, Duncan’s goal was to create a model to explain prestige using different characteristics; using this model, one can predict the prestige of other occupations not recorded in the NORC survey.

The Duncan dataset is a random sample of that contains information on the prestige and other characteristics of 45 U. S. occupations in 1950. The variables are:

occupation represents the type of occupation/title.

income represents the percentage of occupational incumbents who earned incomes in excess of 3,500. education represents the percentage of incumbents in the occupation in the 1950 U.S. Census who were high school graduates. prestige represents the percentage of respondents in a survey who rated an occupation as “good” or “excellent” in prestige. duncan = pd.read_csv('data/duncan.csv').loc[:, ["occupation", "income", "education", "prestige"]] duncan  occupation income education prestige 0 accountant 62 86 82 1 pilot 72 76 83 2 architect 75 92 90 ... ... ... ... ... 42 janitor 7 20 8 43 policeman 34 47 41 44 waiter 8 32 10 45 rows × 4 columns It’s a good idea to explore the data through visualization in order to gain an understanding of the relationships between our variables. To see if we can use income and education to predict prestige, we’ll create scatter plots that show the relation between these variables and prestige. f1 = px.scatter(duncan, x='income', y='prestige') f2 = px.scatter(duncan, x='education', y='prestige') fig = left_right(f1, f2) fig.update_xaxes(title='income', row=1, col=1) fig.update_yaxes(title='prestige', row=1, col=1) fig.update_xaxes(title='education', row=1, col=2)  From the plots above, we see that both education and income are positively correlated with prestige; hence, both of these variables might be useful in helping explain prestige. Let’s fit a linear model using these explanatory variables to explain prestige. ## 19.2.2. Fitting the model¶ We will fit the following model, that explains the prestige of an occupation as a linear function of income and education: \begin{aligned} \texttt{prestige}_i = \theta_0 + \theta_\texttt{income}\cdot\texttt{income}_i + \theta_\texttt{education}\cdot\texttt{education}_i \end{aligned} In order to fit this model, we will define the design matrix (X) and our response variable (y): X = duncan.loc[:, ["income", "education"]] X.head()  income education 0 62 86 1 72 76 2 75 92 3 55 90 4 64 86 y = duncan.loc[:, "prestige"] y.head()  0 82 1 83 2 90 3 76 4 90 Name: prestige, dtype: int64  Below, we fit our linear model and print all the $$\hat{\theta}$$ coefficients of the model (from the equation above) after the model has been fit to the data. Note that these are our sample coefficients. import sklearn.linear_model as lm model = lm.LinearRegression() model.fit(X, y) intercept = model.intercept_ income, education = model.coef_ print(f""" intercept: {intercept:.2f} income: {income:.2f} education: {education:.2f} """)  intercept: -6.06 income: 0.60 education: 0.55  The coefficients above give us an estimate of the true coefficients. But had our sample data been different, we would have fit our model to different data, causing these coefficients to be different. We would like to explore what our coefficients might have been using bootstrapping methods. In our bootstrapping methods and analysis, we will focus on the coefficient of education. We would like to explore the partial relationship between prestige and education holding income constant (rather than the marginal relationship between prestige and education ignoring income). The partial regression coefficient $$\widehat\theta_\texttt{education}$$ illustrates the partial relationship between prestige and education within our data. ## 19.2.3. Bootstrapping the Observations¶ In this method, we consider the pairs $$(X_i, y_i)$$ to be our sample, so we construct the bootstrap resample by sampling with replacement from these pairs: \begin{aligned} (X_i^*, y_i^*) = (X_I, y_I), \text{ where } I=1,\dots,n \text{ is sampled uniformly at random.} \end{aligned} In other words, we sample n observations with replacement from our data points; this is our bootstrap sample. Then we will fit a new linear regression model to this sampled data and record the education coefficient $$\tilde\theta_\texttt{education}$$; this coefficient is our bootstrap statistic. def simple_resample(n): return np.random.randint(low=0, high=n, size=n) def bootstrap(boot_pop, statistic, resample=simple_resample, replicates=10000): n = len(boot_pop) resample_estimates = [statistic(boot_pop[resample(n)]) for _ in range(replicates)] return np.array(resample_estimates)  def educ_coeff(data_array): X = data_array[:, 1:] y = data_array[:, 0] linear_model = lm.LinearRegression() model = linear_model.fit(X, y) theta_educ = model.coef_[1] return theta_educ data_array = duncan.loc[:, ["prestige", "income", "education"]].values theta_hat_sampling = bootstrap(data_array, educ_coeff)  plt.figure(figsize = (4, 3)) plt.hist(theta_hat_sampling, bins=30, density=True) plt.xlabel("\\tilde{\\theta}_{educ}$Values") plt.ylabel("Proportion per Unit") plt.title("Bootstrap Sampling Distribution of$\\tilde{\\theta}_{educ}\$ (Nonparametric)");
plt.show()


Notice how the sampling distribution above is slightly skewed to the left.

### 19.2.3.1. Estimating the True Coefficients¶

Although we cannot directly measure $$\theta^*_\texttt{education}$$ we can use a bootstrap confidence interval to account for variability in the sample regression coefficient $$\widehat\theta_{\texttt{education}}$$. Below, We construct an approximate 95% confidence interval for the true coefficient $$\theta^*_\texttt{education}$$, using the bootstrap percentile method. The confidence interval extends from the 2.5th percentile to the 97.5th percentile of the 10,000 bootstrapped coefficients.

left_confidence_interval_endpoint = np.percentile(theta_hat_sampling, 2.5)
right_confidence_interval_endpoint = np.percentile(theta_hat_sampling, 97.5)

left_confidence_interval_endpoint, right_confidence_interval_endpoint

(0.2349176380021313, 0.7795582405415913)


From the confidence interval above, we estimate that the true coefficient lies between 0.236 and 0.775.

### 19.2.3.2. Could the true coefficient be 0?¶

Although we observed a positive partial relationship between education and prestige (from the 0.55 coefficient), what if the true coefficient is actually 0 and there is no partial relationship between education and prestige? In this case, the association that we observed was just due to variability in obtaining the points that form our sample.

To formally test whether the partial relationship between education and prestige is real, we would like to test the following hypotheses:

Null Hypothesis: The true partial coefficient is 0.

Alternative Hypothesis. The true partial coefficient is not 0.

Since we have already contructed a 95% confidence interval for the true coefficient, we just need to see whether 0 lies within this interval. Notice that 0 does not lie within our confidence interval above; therefore, we have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

If the confidence interval for the true coefficient did contain 0, then we would not have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

### 19.2.3.3. Checking for Collinearity¶

Before taking confidence intervals at face value, it’s also important to check for collinearity—when two (or more) variables are highly correlated with each other. Collinearity can make it seem like variables are not significantly related to the response even if they are. Let’s see a short example. For the data below, we’ll use traits of bird eggs to predict the newborn chick weight.

eggs = pd.read_csv('data/snowy_plover.csv')
eggs

0 7.4 28.80 21.84 5.2
1 7.7 29.04 22.45 5.4
2 7.9 29.36 22.48 5.6
... ... ... ... ...
41 9.1 33.15 23.02 6.6
42 9.9 33.30 23.70 7.1
43 9.0 33.73 22.72 6.3

44 rows × 4 columns

But when we make confidence intervals for the model coefficients, we find something strange. All of the confidence intervals contain 0, which prevents us from concluding that any variable is significantly related to the response.

def egg_thetas(data):
X = data[:, :3]
y = data[:, 3]

model = lm.LinearRegression().fit(X, y)
return model.coef_

egg_thetas = bootstrap(eggs.values, egg_thetas)

egg_ci = np.percentile(egg_thetas, [2.5, 97.5], axis=0)
pd.DataFrame(egg_ci.T,
columns=['lower', 'upper'],

lower upper
theta_egg_weight -0.26 1.10
theta_egg_length -0.10 0.21

To see what’s going on, we’ll make a scatter plot matrix for the data.

px.scatter_matrix(eggs, width=450, height=450)


This shows that bird_weight is highly correlated with all the other variables (the bottom row), which means fitting a linear model is a good idea. But we also see that egg_weight is highly correlated with all the variables (the top row). This means we can’t increase one covariate while keeping the others constant. The individual slopes have no meaning.

One way to fix this is to fit a model that only uses egg_weight. This model performs almost as well as the model that uses all three variables, and the confidence interval for $$\theta^*_{\texttt{egg_weight}}$$ doesn’t contain zero.

def only_egg_weight(data):
X = data[:, :1]
y = data[:, 3]

model = lm.LinearRegression().fit(X, y)
return model.coef_

egg_weight_thetas = bootstrap(eggs.values, only_egg_weight)

pd.DataFrame(
np.percentile(egg_weight_thetas, [2.5, 97.5], axis=0).T,
index=['theta_egg_weight'],
columns=['lower', 'upper'],
)

lower upper
theta_egg_weight 0.6 0.82

It’s no surprise that if you want to predict the weight of the newly-hatched chick, using the weight of the egg is your best move.

As this example shows, checking for collinearity is important for inference. When we fit a model on highly correlated variables, we might not be able to use confidence intervals to conclude that variables are related to the prediction.

In this section, we saw how to use the bootstrap to perform inference for multivariate linear models. We can use bootstrap resampling to create confidence intervals for model coefficients, which then lets us make conclusions about the population. And, we saw how collinearity can prevent us from seeing what variables are important for the model.

This section also illustrates a key tradeoff in data science: the tradeoff between using models for inference or prediction. When we want to fit a model that we can readily use for inference, we remove highly correlated variables so that confidence intervals can show the importance of each variable. But this can mean sacrificing some predictive accuracy, since we have fewer variables to use to make predictions. Before we fit models, we should first understand what our modeling goals are.