Linear Regression and group by in R

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I want to do a linear regression in R using the lm() function. My data is an annual time series with one field for year (22 years) and another for state (50 states). I want to fit a regression for each state so that at the end I have a vector of lm responses. I can imagine doing for loop for each state then doing the regression inside the loop and adding the results of each regression to a vector. That does not seem very R-like, however. In SAS I would do a 'by' statement and in SQL I would do a 'group by'. What's the R way of doing this?

10 Answers

Here's an approach using the plyr package:

d <- data.frame(
  state = rep(c('NY', 'CA'), 10),
  year = rep(1:10, 2),
  response= rnorm(20)
)

library(plyr)
# Break up d by state, then fit the specified model to each piece and
# return a list
models <- dlply(d, "state", function(df) 
  lm(response ~ year, data = df))

# Apply coef to each model and return a data frame
ldply(models, coef)

# Print the summary of each model
l_ply(models, summary, .print = TRUE)

Here's one way using the lme4 package.

 library(lme4)
 d <- data.frame(state=rep(c('NY', 'CA'), c(10, 10)),
                 year=rep(1:10, 2),
                 response=c(rnorm(10), rnorm(10)))

 xyplot(response ~ year, groups=state, data=d, type='l')

 fits <- lmList(response ~ year | state, data=d)
 fits
#------------
Call: lmList(formula = response ~ year | state, data = d)
Coefficients:
   (Intercept)        year
CA -1.34420990  0.17139963
NY  0.00196176 -0.01852429

Degrees of freedom: 20 total; 16 residual
Residual standard error: 0.8201316

In my opinion is a mixed linear model a better approach for this kind of data. The code below given in the fixed effect the overall trend. The random effects indicate how the trend for each individual state differ from the global trend. The correlation structure takes the temporal autocorrelation into account. Have a look at Pinheiro & Bates (Mixed Effects Models in S and S-Plus).

library(nlme)
lme(response ~ year, random = ~year|state, correlation = corAR1(~year))

I think it's worthwhile to add the purrr::map approach to this problem.

library(tidyverse)

d <- data.frame(state=rep(c('NY', 'CA'), c(10, 10)),
                                 year=rep(1:10, 2),
                                 response=c(rnorm(10), rnorm(10)))

d %>% 
  group_by(state) %>% 
  nest() %>% 
  mutate(model = map(data, ~lm(response ~ year, data = .)))

See @Paul Hiemstra's answer for further ideas on using the broom package with these results.

## make fake data
 ngroups <- 2
 group <- 1:ngroups
 nobs <- 100
 dta <- data.frame(group=rep(group,each=nobs),y=rnorm(nobs*ngroups),x=runif(nobs*ngroups))
 head(dta)
#--------------------
  group          y         x
1     1  0.6482007 0.5429575
2     1 -0.4637118 0.7052843
3     1 -0.5129840 0.7312955
4     1 -0.6612649 0.9028034
5     1 -0.5197448 0.1661308
6     1  0.4240346 0.8944253
#------------ 
## function to extract the results of one model
 foo <- function(z) {
   ## coef and se in a data frame
   mr <- data.frame(coef(summary(lm(y~x,data=z))))
   ## put row names (predictors/indep variables)
   mr$predictor <- rownames(mr)
   mr
 }
 ## see that it works
 foo(subset(dta,group==1))
#=========
              Estimate Std..Error   t.value  Pr...t..   predictor
(Intercept)  0.2176477  0.1919140  1.134090 0.2595235 (Intercept)
x           -0.3669890  0.3321875 -1.104765 0.2719666           x
#----------
## one option: use command by
 res <- by(dta,dta$group,foo)
 res
#=========
dta$group: 1
              Estimate Std..Error   t.value  Pr...t..   predictor
(Intercept)  0.2176477  0.1919140  1.134090 0.2595235 (Intercept)
x           -0.3669890  0.3321875 -1.104765 0.2719666           x
------------------------------------------------------------ 
dta$group: 2
               Estimate Std..Error    t.value  Pr...t..   predictor
(Intercept) -0.04039422  0.1682335 -0.2401081 0.8107480 (Intercept)
x            0.06286456  0.3020321  0.2081387 0.8355526           x

## using package plyr is better
 library(plyr)
 res <- ddply(dta,"group",foo)
 res
#----------
  group    Estimate Std..Error    t.value  Pr...t..   predictor
1     1  0.21764767  0.1919140  1.1340897 0.2595235 (Intercept)
2     1 -0.36698898  0.3321875 -1.1047647 0.2719666           x
3     2 -0.04039422  0.1682335 -0.2401081 0.8107480 (Intercept)
4     2  0.06286456  0.3020321  0.2081387 0.8355526           x
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