On May 7, 2011, at 16:15 , Ben Haller wrote:

> On May 6, 2011, at 4:27 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
> 
>> On May 6, 2011, at 4:16 PM, Ben Haller wrote:
>>> 
>> 
>>> As for correlated coefficients: x, x^2, x^3 etc. would obviously be highly 
>>> correlated, for values close to zero.
>> 
>> Not just for x close to zero:
>> 
>>> cor( (10:20)^2, (10:20)^3 )
>> [1] 0.9961938
>>> cor( (100:200)^2, (100:200)^3 )
>> [1] 0.9966219
> 
>  Wow, that's very interesting.  Quite unexpected, for me.  Food for thought.  
> Thanks!
> 

Notice that because of the high correlations between the x^k, their parameter 
estimates will be correlated too. In practice, this means that the c.i. for the 
quartic term contains values for which you can compensate with the other 
coefficients and still have an acceptable fit to data. (Nothing strange about 
that; already in simple linear regression, you allow the intercept to change 
while varying the slope.)


-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd....@cbs.dk  Priv: pda...@gmail.com

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