On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 10:58 PM, karena <dr.jz...@gmail.com> wrote: > Thank you so much for this reply, Peter. It helps. > > I know this is one way to adjust for covariates. However, if what I want is > to get the 'remaining values' after adjustment. For example, say, 'gene > expression' value is denoted as 'ge', and for each gene, > ge=a*age+b*sex+c*per_se > > My question is: how to get the value of 'per_se' for each gene?
You could use the residuals after regressing the expression on sex and age. I think the call would be residuals(lm(expression~age+sex)) but try it and see if it makes sense. Just note that the residual depends on how you define sex and and age; for example, if you shift age by 10, the residuals shift by a*age. Similarly, the residuals will depend on whether you use sex values (1,2) or (0,1) or (2,1) etc. for (female, male). Thus you need to be careful when interpreting the residuals. I would suggest standardizing age to mean zero so the residuals have the interpretation of expression at average age. Standardization for sex makes statistical but not biological sense since there are no samples with average sex. Peter ______________________________________________ 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.
