formula.gam {mgcv}R Documentation

GAM formula

Description

Description of gam formula (see Details), and how to extract it from a fitted gam object.

Usage

## S3 method for class 'gam':
formula(x,...)

Arguments

x fitted model objects of class gam (see gamObject) as produced by gam().
... un-used in this case

Details

The formula supplied to gam is exactly like that supplied to glm except that smooth terms, s and te can be added to the right hand side (and . is not supported in gam formulae).

Smooth terms are specified by expressions of the form:
s(x1,x2,...,k=12,fx=FALSE,bs="tp",by=z,id=1)
where x1, x2, etc. are the covariates which the smooth is a function of, and k is the dimension of the basis used to represent the smooth term. If k is not specified then basis specific defaults are used. fx is used to indicate whether or not this term should be unpenalized, and therefore have a fixed number of degrees of freedom set by k (almost always k-1). bs indicates the basis to use for the smooth: the built in options are described in smooth.terms, and user defined smooths can be added (see user.defined.smooth). If bs is not supplied then the default "tp" (tprs) basis is used. by can be used to specify a variable by which the smooth should be multiplied. For example gam(y~s(x,by=z)) would specify a model E(y)=f(x)z where f(.) is a smooth function. The by option is particularly useful for models in which different functions of the same variable are required for each level of a factor and for `varying coefficient models': see gam.models. id is used to give smooths identities: smooths with the same identity have the same basis, penalty and smoothing parameter (but different coefficients, so they are different functions).

An alternative for specifying smooths of more than one covariate is e.g.:
te(x,z,bs=c("tp","tp"),m=c(2,3),k=c(5,10))
which would specify a tensor product smooth of the two covariates x and z constructed from marginal t.p.r.s. bases of dimension 5 and 10 with marginal penalties of order 2 and 3. Any combination of basis types is possible, as is any number of covariates. te provides further information.

Both s and te terms accept an sp argument of supplied smoothing parameters: positive values are taken as fixed values to be used, negative to indicate that the parameter should be estimated. If sp is supplied then it over-rides whatever is in the sp argument to gam, if it is not supplied then it defaults to all negative, but does not over-ride the sp argument to gam.

Formulae can involve nested or ``overlapping'' terms such as
y~s(x)+s(z)+s(x,z) or y~s(x,z)+s(z,v):
see gam.side for further details and examples.

Smooth terms in a gam formula will accept matrix arguments as covariates (and corresponding by variable), in which case a `summation convention' is invoked. Consider the example of s(X,Z,by=L) where X, Z and L are n by m matrices. Let F be the n by m matrix that results from evaluating the smooth at the values in X and Z. Then the contribution to the linear predictor from the term will be rowSums(F*L) (note the element-wise multiplication). This convention allows the linear predictor of the GAM to depend on (a discrete approximation to) any linear functional of a smooth: see linear.functional.terms for more information and examples (including functional linear models/signal regression).

Note that gam allows any term in the model formula to be penalized (possibly by multiple penalties), via the paraPen argument. See gam.models for details and example code.

Value

Returns the model formula, x$formula. Provided so that anova methods print an appropriate description of the model.

Author(s)

Simon N. Wood simon.wood@r-project.org

See Also

gam


[Package mgcv version 1.5-5 Index]