In section 18.4.1 of the Biostatsitics for Biomedical Research Notes, Frank Harrell offers an example of how model selection on proportion classified correctly can trick us into selecting the improper model.
The example is show below. If I remember correctly, the right model is the third model (age + sex).
Can someone please clarify if the chi-square statistic is the total chi-square minus degrees of freedom? I’ve implemented a facsimile of this example in R as follows:
N = 400
age = round(rnorm(N))
sex = rbinom(N, 1, 0.5)
noise = rnorm(N)
p = plogis(1.6*age + 0.5*sex)
y = rbinom(N, 1, p)
model_1 = lrm(y~age)
model_2 = lrm(y~sex)
model_3 = lrm(y~sex + age)
model_4 = lrm(y~sex + age + noise)
models = list(model_1, model_2, model_3, model_4)
accs = map_dbl(models, ~{
preds = as.integer(predict(.x)>0.5)
Metrics::accuracy(y, preds)
})
aics = map_dbl(models, AIC)
X1 = anova(model_1)['TOTAL','Chi-Square'] - anova(model_1)['TOTAL','d.f.']
X2 = anova(model_2)['TOTAL','Chi-Square'] - anova(model_2)['TOTAL','d.f.']
X3 = anova(model_3)['TOTAL','Chi-Square'] - anova(model_3)['TOTAL','d.f.']
X4 = anova(model_4)['TOTAL','Chi-Square'] - anova(model_4)['TOTAL','d.f.']
X = c(X1,X2,X3,X4)
With 400 samples, the correct model has largest chi square (assuming it is the total chi-square) 53% of the time (accuracy selects the correct model less often). AIC selects the right model more often than either chii-square or accuracy. When the sample size is increased by an order of magnitude to 4000, the chi-square approach I’ve implemented selects the right model upwards of 90% of the time beating both AIC and accuracy.