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Re: Quasi AIC in Splus

To: Rosalind Renfrew <rrenfrew@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Quasi AIC in Splus
From: Prof Brian D Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2001 07:12:53 +0100 (BST)
Cc: <s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu>
In-reply-to: <200104222029.PAA155570@mail1.doit.wisc.edu>
On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Rosalind Renfrew wrote:

> I have a question for Splus experts:
>
> Burnham and Anderson, in their book "Model selection and inference" about
> Akaike Information Criteria (AIC), said that (as of 1989) there are no

1989 is a very long time ago: S-PLUS 2.0 as I recall.

> statistical software packages that compute QAIC, the specific form of AIC
> calculated when using the quasi function in generalized linear models. When
> I use Splus 2000 to use quasi, it gives me an AIC value under the "step"
> function, but can I assume this is the correct QAIC value?  Or do I need to

No, not even for a binomial or Poisson model.  It's the wrong definition
applied to the linear approximation at the fitted values.  That's why there
is stepAIC in library MASS.

> calculate it separately by hand? If I need to calculate it, I need the
> log-likelihood value for the model, which I need to divide by the dispersion
> parameter (c-hat).  Is there a straightforward way of obtaining the
> log-likelihood in the output?

A quasi model does not have a log-likelihood, and does not even necessarily
have a quasi-likelihood, although for the variance families implemented in
glm() in S one is assumed to exist.  So what exactly is the definition
of `quasi AIC'?

The issue seems to be to do with using binomial/Poisson model with
overdispersion, from what you say.  In that case stepAIC will do
what you seem to want from your `manual' description.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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