On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, Ralf Goertz wrote: > S Ellison, Donnerstag, 18. Oktober 2007: >>> I think there is reason to be surprised, I am, too. ... >>> What am I missing? >> >> Read the formula and ?summary.lm more closely. The denominator, >> >> Sum((y[i]- y*)^2) >> >> is very large if the mean value of y is substantially nonzero and y* >> set to 0 as the calculation implies for a forced zero intercept. > > But in that case the numerator is very large, too, isn't it? I don't > want to argue, though. You might very well be right. But so far, I have > not managed to create a dataset where R^2 is larger for the model with > forced zero intercept (although I have not tried very hard). It would be > very convincing to see one (Etienne?) >
Consider the data set (a+1, a+1) (a+2, a+2) (a+3, a+2) For any a>0 line with zero intercept will have residual mean square less than 1 (in fact, close to 0.5), so the residual sum of squares is less than 3. The sum of squares around zero is about 3a^2, so the r^2 for the zero-intercept model is more than 1-1/a^2. The r^2 for the model with intercept does not depend on a: it is 0.75. -thomas Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Washington, Seattle ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.