# 5  Describing, Resampling, Validating, and Simplifying the Model

## 5.1 Describing the Fitted Model

### 5.1.1 Interpreting Effects

• Regression coefficients if 1 d.f. per factor, no interaction
• Not standardized regression coefficients
• Many programs print meaningless estimates such as effect of increasing age$$^2$$ by one unit, holding age constant
• Need to account for nonlinearity, interaction, and use meaningful ranges
• For monotonic relationships, estimate $$X\hat{\beta}$$ at quartiles of continuous variables, separately for various levels of interacting factors
• Subtract estimates, anti-log, e.g., to get inter-quartile-range odds or hazards ratios. Base C.L. on s.e. of difference. See Figure 21.4.
• Partial effect plot: Plot effect of each predictor on $$X\beta$$ or some transformation. See Figure 21.2. See also Karvanen & Harrell (2009).
• Nomogram. See Figure 21.5
• Use regression tree to approximate the full model
AB

### 5.1.2 Indexes of Model Performance

#### Error Measures

• Central tendency of prediction errors
• Mean absolute prediction error: mean $$|Y - \hat{Y}|$$
• Mean squared prediction error
• Binary $$Y$$: Brier score (quadratic proper scoring rule)
• Logarithmic proper scoring rule (avg. log-likelihood)
• Discrimination measures
• Pure discrimination: rank correlation of $$(\hat{Y}, Y)$$

• Spearman $$\rho$$, Kendall $$\tau$$, Somers’ $$D_{xy}$$
• $$Y$$ binary $$\rightarrow$$ $$D_{xy} = 2\times (C - \frac{1}{2})$$
$$C$$ = concordance probability = area under receiver operating characteristic curve $$\propto$$ Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney statistic
• Mostly discrimination: $$R^{2}$$

• $$R^{2}_{\mathrm{adj}}$$—overfitting corrected if model pre-specified
• Brier score can be decomposed into discrimination and calibration components

• Discrimination measures based on variation in $$\hat{Y}$$

• regression sum of squares
• $$g$$–index
• Calibration measures
• calibration–in–the–large: average $$\hat{Y}$$ vs. average $$Y$$
• high-resolution calibration curve (calibration–in–the–small). See Figure 12.7.
• calibration slope and intercept
• maximum absolute calibration error
• mean absolute calibration error
• 0.9 quantile of calibration error
CDE

See Van Calster et al. (2016) for a nice discussion of different levels of calibration stringency and their relationship to likelihood of errors in decision making.

$$g$$–Index

• Based on Gini’s mean difference
• mean over all possible $$i \neq j$$ of $$|Z_{i} - Z_{j}|$$
• interpretable, robust, highly efficient measure of variation
• $$g =$$ Gini’s mean difference of $$X_{i}\hat{\beta} = \hat{Y}$$
• Example: $$Y=$$ systolic blood pressure; $$g = 11$$mmHg is typical difference in $$\hat{Y}$$
• Independent of censoring etc.
• For models in which anti-log of difference in $$\hat{Y}$$ represent meaningful ratios (odds ratios, hazard ratios, ratio of medians):
$$g_{r} = \exp(g)$$
• For models in which $$\hat{Y}$$ can be turned into a probability estimate (e.g., logistic regression):
$$g_{p} =$$ Gini’s mean difference of $$\hat{P}$$
• These $$g$$–indexes represent e.g. “typical” odds ratios, “typical” risk differences
• Can define partial $$g$$
FG

## 5.2 The Bootstrap

• If know population model, use simulation or analytic derivations to study behavior of statistical estimator
• Suppose $$Y$$ has a cumulative dist. fctn. $$F(y) = \Pr\{Y \leq y\}$$
• We have sample of size $$n$$ from $$F(y)$$,
$$Y_{1}, Y_{2}, \ldots, Y_{n}$$
• Steps:
1. Repeatedly simulate sample of size $$n$$ from $$F$$
2. Compute statistic of interest
3. Study behavior over $$B$$ repetitions
• Example: 1000 samples, 1000 sample medians, compute their sample variance
• $$F$$ unknown $$\rightarrow$$ estimate by empirical dist. fctn. $F_{n}(y) = \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n} [Y_{i} \leq y].$
• Example: sample of size $$n=30$$ from a normal distribution with mean 100 and SD 10
HI
Code
spar()
set.seed(6)
x <- rnorm(30, 100, 20)
xs <- seq(50, 150, length=150)
cdf <- pnorm(xs, 100, 20)
plot(xs, cdf, type='l', ylim=c(0,1),
xlab=expression(x),
ylab=expression(paste("Pr(", X <= x, ")")))
lines(ecdf(x), cex=.5)
• $$F_{n}$$ corresponds to density function placing probability $$\frac{1}{n}$$ at each observed data point ($$\frac{k}{n}$$ if point duplicated $$k$$ times)
• Pretend that $$F \equiv F_{n}$$
• Sampling from $$F_{n} \equiv$$ sampling with replacement from observed data $$Y_{1},\ldots,Y_{n}$$
• Large $$n$$ $$\rightarrow$$ selects $$1-e^{-1} \approx 0.632$$ of original data points in each bootstrap sample at least once
• Some observations not selected, others selected more than once
• Efron’s bootstrap $$\rightarrow$$ general-purpose technique for estimating properties of estimators without assuming or knowing distribution of data $$F$$
• Take $$B$$ samples of size $$n$$ with replacement, choose $$B$$ so that summary measure of individual statistics $$\approx$$ summary if $$B=\infty$$
• Bootstrap based on distribution of observed differences between a resampled parameter estimate and the original estimate telling us about the distribution of unobservable differences between the original estimate and the unknown parameter
JKL

Example: Data $$(1,5,6,7,8,9)$$, obtain 0.80 confidence interval for population median, and estimate of population expected value of sample median (only to estimate the bias in the original estimate of the median).

M
Code
spar(ps=9, mfrow=c(1,2))
options(digits=3)
y <- c(2,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,19,20,21)
y <- c(1,5,6,7,8,9)
set.seed(17)
n   <- length(y)
n2  <- n/2
n21 <- n2+1
B   <- 400
M <- double(B)
plot(0, 0, xlim=c(0,B), ylim=c(3,9),
xlab="Bootstrap Samples Used",
ylab="Mean and 0.1, 0.9 Quantiles", type="n")
for(i in 1:B) {
s <- sample(1:n, n, replace=T)
x <- sort(y[s])
m <- .5*(x[n2]+x[n21])
M[i] <- m
points(i, mean(M[1:i]), pch=46)
if(i>=10) {
q <- quantile(M[1:i], c(.1,.9))
points(i, q[1], pch=46, col='blue')
points(i, q[2], pch=46, col='blue')
}
}
table(M)
M
1   3 3.5   4 4.5   5 5.5   6 6.5   7 7.5   8 8.5   9
2   7   6   2   1  30  45  59  72  70  45  48   8   5 
Code
hist(M, nclass=length(unique(M)), xlab="", main="")

First 20 samples:

Bootstrap Sample Sample Median
1 5 5 7 8 9 6.0
1 1 5 7 9 9 6.0
6 7 7 8 9 9 7.5
1 1 5 6 8 9 5.5
1 6 7 7 8 8 7.0
1 5 6 8 8 9 7.0
1 6 8 8 9 9 8.0
5 5 6 7 8 9 6.5
1 5 6 7 7 8 6.5
1 5 6 8 9 9 7.0
1 5 7 7 8 9 7.0
1 5 6 6 7 8 6.0
1 6 6 7 8 9 6.5
5 6 7 7 8 9 7.0
1 5 6 8 8 8 7.0
1 1 6 6 7 8 6.0
5 5 5 8 8 9 6.5
5 6 6 6 7 7 6.0
1 5 7 9 9 9 8.0
1 1 5 5 5 7 5.0
• Histogram tells us whether we can assume normality for the bootstrap medians or need to use quantiles of medians to construct C.L.
• Need high $$B$$ for quantiles, low for variance (but see Booth & Sarkar (1998))
• See Bradley Efron & Narasimhan (2020) for useful information about bootstrap confidence intervals and the latest R functions
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## 5.3 Model Validation

### 5.3.1 Introduction

• External validation (best: another country at another time); also validates sampling, measurements
• Internal
• apparent (evaluate fit on same data used to create fit)
• data splitting
• cross-validation
• bootstrap: get overfitting-corrected accuracy index
• Best way to make model fit data well is to discard much of the data
• Predictions on another dataset will be inaccurate
• Need unbiased assessment of predictive accuracy
OP

Working definition of external validation: Validation of a prediction tool on a sample that was not available at publication time.

Alternate: Validation of a prediction tool by an independent research team.

One suggested hierarchy of the quality of various validation methods is as follows, ordered from worst to best.

1. Attempting several validations (internal or external) and reporting only the one that “worked”
2. Reporting apparent performance on the training dataset (no validation)
3. Reporting predictive accuracy on an undersized independent test sample
4. Internal validation using data splitting where at least one of the training and test samples is not huge and the investigator is not aware of the arbitrariness of variable selection done on a single sample
5. Strong internal validation using 100 repeats of 10-fold cross-validation or several hundred bootstrap resamples, repeating all analysis steps involving $$Y$$ afresh at each re-sample and the arbitrariness of selected “important variables” is reported (if variable selection is used)
6. External validation on a large test sample, done by the original research team
7. Re-analysis by an independent research team using strong internal validation of the original dataset
8. External validation using new test data, done by an independent research team
9. External validation using new test data generated using different instruments/technology, done by an independent research team
QR

Some points to consider:

• Unless both sample sizes are huge, external validation can be low precision
• External validation can be costly and slow and may result in disappointment that would have been revealed earlier with rigorous internal validation
• External validation is sometimes gamed; researchers disappointed in the validation sometimes ask for a “do over”; resampling validation is harder to game as long as all analytical steps using $$Y$$ are repeated each time.
• Instead of external validation to determine model applicability at a different time or place, and being disappointed if the model does not work in that setting, consider building a unified model containing time and place as predictors
• When the model was fully pre-specified, external validation tests the model
• But when the model was fitted using machine learning, feature screening, variable selection, or model selection, the model developed using training data is usually only an example of a model, and the test sample validation could be called an example validation
• When resampling is used to repeat all modeling steps for each resample, rigorous internal validation tests the process used to develop the model and happens to also provide a high-precision estimate of the likely future performance of the “final” model developed using that process, properly penalizing for model uncertainty.
• Resampling also reveals the volatility of the model selection process
ST

$$\rightarrow$$ See BBR

Collins et al. (2016) estimate that a typical sample size needed for externally validating a time-to-event model is 200 events.

### 5.3.2 Which Quantities Should Be Used in Validation?

• OLS: $$R^2$$ is one good measure for quantifying drop-off in predictive ability
• Example: $$n=10, p=9$$, apparent $$R^{2}=1$$ but $$R^2$$ will be close to zero on new subjects
• Example: $$n=20, p=10$$, apparent $$R^{2}=.9$$, $$R^2$$ on new data 0.7, $$R^{2}_{adj} = 0.79$$
• Adjusted $$R^2$$ solves much of the bias problem assuming $$p$$ in its formula is the largest number of parameters ever examined against $$Y$$
• Few other adjusted indexes exist
• Also need to validate models with phantom d.f.
• Cross-validation or bootstrap can provide unbiased estimate of any index; bootstrap has higher precision
• Two main types of quantities to validate
1. Calibration or reliability: ability to make unbiased estimates of response ($$\hat{Y}$$ vs. $$Y$$)
2. Discrimination: ability to separate responses
OLS: $$R^2$$; $$g$$-index; binary logistic model: ROC area, equivalent to rank correlation between predicted probability of event and 0/1 event
• Unbiased validation nearly always necessary, to detect overfitting
UV

### 5.3.3 Data-Splitting

• Split data into training and test sets
• Interesting to compare index of accuracy in training and test
• Freeze parameters from training
• Make sure you allow $$R^{2} = 1-SSE/SST$$ for test sample to be $$<0$$
• Don’t compute ordinary $$R^2$$ on $$X\hat{\beta}$$ vs. $$Y$$; this allows for linear recalibration $$aX\hat{\beta} + b$$ vs. $$Y$$
• Test sample must be large enough to obtain very accurate assessment of accuracy
• Training sample is what’s left
• Example: overall sample $$n=300$$, training sample $$n=200$$, develop model, freeze $$\hat{\beta}$$, predict on test sample ($$n=100$$), $$R^{2} = 1 - \frac{\sum(Y_{i}-X_{i}\hat{\beta})^{2}}{\sum(Y_{i}-\bar{Y})^{2}}$$.
1. Costly in $$\downarrow n$$
2. Requires decision to split at beginning of analysis
3. Requires larger sample held out than cross-validation
4. Results vary if split again
5. Does not validate the final model (from recombined data)
6. Not helpful in getting CL corrected for var. selection
7. Nice summary of disadvantages: Steyerberg (2018)
WXY

### 5.3.4 Improvements on Data-Splitting: Resampling

• No sacrifice in sample size
• Work when modeling process automated
• Bootstrap excellent for studying arbitrariness of variable selection .
• Cross-validation solves many problems of data splitting
• Example of $$\times$$-validation:
1. Split data at random into 10 tenths
2. Leave out $$\frac{1}{10}$$ of data at a time
3. Develop model on $$\frac{9}{10}$$, including any variable selection, pre-testing, etc.
4. Freeze coefficients, evaluate on $$\frac{1}{10}$$
5. Average $$R^2$$ over 10 reps
• Drawbacks:
1. Choice of number of groups and repetitions
2. Doesn’t show full variability of var. selection
3. Does not validate full model
4. Lower precision than bootstrap
5. Need to do 50 repeats of 10-fold cross-validation to ensure adequate precision
• Randomization method
1. Randomly permute $$Y$$
2. Optimism = performance of fitted model compared to what expect by chance
ZAB

### 5.3.5 Validation Using the Bootstrap

• Estimate optimism of final whole sample fit without holding out data
• From original $$X$$ and $$Y$$ select sample of size $$n$$ with replacement
• Derive model from bootstrap sample
• Apply to original sample
• Simple bootstrap uses average of indexes computed on original sample
• Estimated optimism = difference in indexes
• Repeat about $$B=100$$ times, get average expected optimism
• Subtract average optimism from apparent index in final model
• Example: $$n=1000$$, have developed a final model that is hopefully ready to publish. Call estimates from this final model $$\hat{\beta}$$.
• final model has apparent $$R^2$$ ($$R^{2}_{app}$$) =0.4
• how inflated is $$R^{2}_{app}$$?
• get resamples of size 1000 with replacement from original 1000
• for each resample compute $$R^{2}_{boot}$$ = apparent $$R^2$$ in bootstrap sample
• freeze these coefficients (call them $$\hat{\beta}_{boot}$$), apply to original (whole) sample $$(X_{orig}, Y_{orig})$$ to get $$R^{2}_{orig} = R^{2}(X_{orig}\hat{\beta}_{boot}, Y_{orig})$$
• optimism = $$R^{2}_{boot} - R^{2}_{orig}$$
• average over $$B=100$$ optimisms to get $$\overline{optimism}$$
• $$R^{2}_{overfitting~corrected} = R^{2}_{app} - \overline{optimism}$$
CD
• Example: Chapter 8
• Is estimating unconditional (not conditional on $$X$$) distribution of $$R^2$$, etc.
• Conditional estimates would require assuming the model one is trying to validate
• Efron’s “$$.632$$” method may perform better (reduce bias further) for small $$n$$ , , Bradley Efron & Tibshirani (1997)
E

Bootstrap useful for assessing calibration in addition to discrimination:

• Fit $$C(Y|X) = X\beta$$ on bootstrap sample
• Re-fit $$C(Y|X) = \gamma_{0} + \gamma_{1}X\hat{\beta}$$ on same data
• $$\hat{\gamma}_{0}=0, \hat{\gamma}_{1}=1$$
• Test data (original dataset): re-estimate $$\gamma_{0}, \gamma_{1}$$
• $$\hat{\gamma}_{1}<1$$ if overfit, $$\hat{\gamma}_{0} > 0$$ to compensate
• $$\hat{\gamma}_{1}$$ quantifies overfitting and useful for improving calibration
• Use Efron’s method to estimate optimism in $$(0,1)$$, estimate $$(\gamma_{0}, \gamma_{1})$$ by subtracting optimism from $$(0,1)$$
• See also Copas (1987) and van Houwelingen & le Cessie (1990), p. 1318
F

See Freedman et al. (1988) for warnings about the bootstrap, and B. Efron (1983) for variations on the bootstrap to reduce bias.

Use bootstrap to choose between full and reduced models:

• Bootstrap estimate of accuracy for full model
• Repeat, using chosen stopping rule for each re-sample
• Full fit usually outperforms reduced model
• Stepwise modeling often reduces optimism but this is not offset by loss of information from deleting marginal var.
G
Method Apparent Rank Correlation of Predicted vs. Observed Over-optimism Bias-Corrected Correlation
Full Model 0.50 0.06 0.44
Stepwise Model 0.47 0.05 0.42

In this example, stepwise modeling lost a possible $$0.50 - 0.47 = 0.03$$ predictive discrimination. The full model fit will especially be an improvement when

1. The stepwise selection deleted several variables which were almost significant.
2. These marginal variables have some real predictive value, even if it’s slight.
3. There is no small set of extremely dominant variables that would be easily found by stepwise selection.
H

Other issues:

• See van Houwelingen & le Cessie (1990) for many interesting ideas
• Faraway (1992) shows how bootstrap is used to penalize for choosing transformations for $$Y$$, outlier and influence checking, variable selection, etc. simultaneously
• Brownstone (1988), p. 74 feels that “theoretical statisticians have been unable to analyze the sampling properties of (usual multi-step modeling strategies) under realistic conditions” and concludes that the modeling strategy must be completely specified and then bootstrapped to get consistent estimates of variances and other sampling properties
• See Blettner & Sauerbrei (1993) and Chatfield (1995) for more interesting examples of problems resulting from data-driven analyses.
I

## 5.4 Bootstrapping Ranks of Predictors

• Order of importance of predictors not pre-specified
• Researcher interested in determining “winners” and “losers”
• Bootstrap useful in documenting the difficulty of this task
• Get confidence limits of the rank of each predictor in the scale of partial $$\chi^2$$ - d.f.
• Example using OLS
J
Code
# Use the plot method for anova, with pl=FALSE to suppress actual
# plotting of chi-square - d.f. for each bootstrap repetition.
# Rank the negative of the adjusted chi-squares so that a rank of
# 1 is assigned to the highest.  It is important to tell
# plot.anova.rms not to sort the results, or every bootstrap
# replication would have ranks of 1,2,3,... for the stats.
require(rms)
n <- 300
set.seed(1)
d <- data.frame(x1=runif(n), x2=runif(n), x3=runif(n), x4=runif(n),
x5=runif(n), x6=runif(n), x7=runif(n), x8=runif(n),
x9=runif(n), x10=runif(n), x11=runif(n), x12=runif(n))
d\$y <- with(d, 1*x1 + 2*x2 +  3*x3  +  4*x4  + 5*x5 + 6*x6 + 7*x7 +
8*x8 + 9*x9 + 10*x10 + 11*x11 + 12*x12 + 9*rnorm(n))

f <- ols(y ~ x1+x2+x3+x4+x5+x6+x7+x8+x9+x10+x11+x12, data=d)
B <- 1000
ranks <- matrix(NA, nrow=B, ncol=12)
rankvars <- function(fit)
rank(plot(anova(fit), sort='none', pl=FALSE))
Rank <- rankvars(f)
for(i in 1:B) {
j <- sample(1:n, n, TRUE)
bootfit <- update(f, data=d, subset=j)
ranks[i,] <- rankvars(bootfit)
}
lim <- t(apply(ranks, 2, quantile, probs=c(.025,.975)))
predictor <- factor(names(Rank), names(Rank))
w <- data.frame(predictor, Rank, lower=lim[,1], upper=lim[,2])
require(ggplot2)
ggplot(w, aes(x=predictor, y=Rank)) + geom_point() + coord_flip() +
scale_y_continuous(breaks=1:12) +
geom_errorbar(aes(ymin=lim[,1], ymax=lim[,2]), width=0)

## 5.5 Simplifying the Final Model by Approximating It

### 5.5.1 Difficulties Using Full Models

• Predictions are conditional on all variables, standard errors $$\uparrow$$ when predict for a low-frequency category
• Collinearity
• Can average predictions over categories to marginalize, $$\downarrow$$ s.e.
K

### 5.5.2 Approximating the Full Model

• Full model is gold standard
• Approximate it to any desired degree of accuracy
• If approx. with a tree, best c-v tree will have 1 obs./node
• Can use least squares to approx. model by predicting $$\hat{Y} = X\hat{\beta}$$
• When original model also fit using least squares, coef. of approx. model against $$\hat{Y} \equiv$$ coef. of subset of variables fitted against $$Y$$ (as in stepwise)
• Model approximation still has some advantages
1. Uses unbiased estimate of $$\sigma$$ from full fit
2. Stopping rule less arbitrary
3. Inheritance of shrinkage
• If estimates from full model are $$\hat{\beta}$$ and approx.
model is based on a subset $$T$$ of predictors $$X$$, coef. of approx.
model are $$W \hat{\beta}$$, where
$$W = (T'T)^{-1}T'X$$
• Variance matrix of reduced coef.: $$W V W'$$
LM

## 5.6 How Do We Break Bad Habits?

• Insist on validation of predictive models and discoveries
• Show collaborators that split-sample validation is not appropriate unless the number of subjects is huge
• Split more than once and see volatile results
• Calculate a confidence interval for the predictive accuracy in the test dataset and show that it is very wide
• Run simulation study with no real associations and show that associations are easy to find
• Analyze the collaborator’s data after randomly permuting the $$Y$$ vector and show some positive findings
• Show that alternative explanations are easy to posit
• Importance of a risk factor may disappear if 5 “unimportant” risk factors are added back to the model
• Omitted main effects can explain apparent interactions
• Uniqueness analysis: attempt to predict the predicted values from a model derived by data torture from all of the features not used in the model
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