Week 11: Collinearity (03/23/2023)
Ozlem Tuncel
otuncelgurlek1@gsu.edu
⚠️ CAUTION: DO NOT SOLELY RELY ON MY NOTES. THERE MIGHT BE TYPOS AND MISTAKES. ALWAYS TAKE YOUR NOTES!
✔️ The goal of this week is understanding multicollinearity issue in depth.
You will be doing peer-review this week. So, here is how to hone your peer-review skills:
- Around 1.5 page, and nothing less or more is not helpful.
- Introduction should be a one paragraph of brief summary of the manuscript, and your overall comment about the contribution.
- Main body should be about main criticisms. 3 is the ideal number of major concerns. Spend a paragraph on each. If it is an obvious mistake, do not explain why. But if that is not a obvious one, make sure to include an explanation. Pair your criticism with a suggestion.
- End with minor points with bullet points. Major typos, formatting issues, aesthetics … are some of the examples of minor issues.
## Here are some key points from the lecture:
- Perfect multicollinearity deals with $X$. We assume that X is full rank, $N>k$, and sufficient variability in $X$.
- If our coefficients add up to zero - this is perfect multicollinearity.
- Theoretically, this is a major problem. In real life, it is not because R will not produce results for the variable causing this error.
- You need more observations than your number of variables. This is problematic theoretically and practically because R will produce
NaN
.
- Colinearity is really easy to diagnose with Pearson’s R. But, multicollinearity is tricky because it can exist even with relatively low pairwise correlation.
- Multicollinearity is sample problem.
Here is the article suggestion on variable selection (ART):
- Achen, C. H. (2002). Toward a new political methodology: Microfoundations and ART. Annual Review of Political Science, 5(1), 423-450.