Dear list, I want to perform a logistic regression analysis with multiple categorical predictors (i.e., a logit) on some data where there is a very definite relationship between one predicator and the response/independent variable. The problem I have is that in such a case the p value goes very high (while I as a naive newbie would expect it to crash towards 0).
I'll illustrate my problem with some toy data. Say I have the following data as an input frame: roman animal colour 1 alpha dog black 2 beta cat white 3 alpha dog black 4 alpha cat black 5 beta dog white 6 alpha cat black 7 gamma dog white 8 alpha cat black 9 gamma dog white 10 beta cat white 11 alpha dog black 12 alpha cat black 13 gamma dog white 14 alpha cat black 15 beta dog white 16 beta cat black 17 alpha cat black 18 beta dog white In this toy data you can see that roman:alpha and roman:beta are pretty good predictors of colour Let's say I perform logistic analysis directly on the raw data with colour as a response variable: > options(contrasts=c("contr.treatment","contr.poly")) > anal1 <- glm(data$colour~data$roman+data$animal,family=binomial) then I find that my P values for each individual level coefficient approach 1: Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|) (Intercept) -41.65 19609.49 -0.002 0.998 data$romanbeta 42.35 19609.49 0.002 0.998 data$romangamma 43.74 31089.48 0.001 0.999 data$animaldog 20.48 13866.00 0.001 0.999 while I expect the p value for roman:beta to be quite low because it is a good predictor of colour:white On the other hand, if I then run an anova with a Chi-sq test on the result model, I find as I would expect that 'roman' is a good predictor of colour. > anova(anal1,test="Chisq") Analysis of Deviance Table Model: binomial, link: logit Response: data$colour Terms added sequentially (first to last) Df Deviance Resid. Df Resid. Dev P(>|Chi|) NULL 17 24.7306 data$roman 2 19.3239 15 5.4067 6.366e-05 *** data$animal 1 1.5876 14 3.8191 0.2077 --- Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 > Can anyone please explain why my p value is so high for the individual levels? Sorry for what is likely a stupid question. Claus p.s., when I run logistic analysis on data that is more 'randomised' everything comes out as I expect. ______________________________________________ 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.