Welcome! I wonder if anyone can help me on this one…

I’m currently trying to learn R, and am stumped. I want to produce a scatter plot with a power regression line plotted through my data points. Easy-peasy in Excel, I was able to knock up the following in about 30 secs:

Power regression plot by Ginger F0x, on Flickr

I can plot the points fine in R, using both the inbuilt plot function and the ggplot2 package. But I can’t find anything online that lets me plot the power regression through the points. I can do linear, loess, polynomial, but that’s not what I’m after. A web search turned up nothing useful…

Any takers? 😀

Posted 7 years ago

Why don’t you just plot the data as log(Rw) vs. log(Sal) with a linear regression line through the data? Non-linear fitting is fine, but log-log is easier.

y = ax^b so log(y) = log(a) + b log(x)

find b from your regression.

Alternatively, looking at your data, it’s pretty obvious that the product of Sal x Rw is a constant (power is minus unity). So you could also plot 1/Rw vs. Sal. That would give a nice regression line but tell you about the value of a only (because b is fixed to -1).

EDIT: if you STILL want to model the data as is, then I suggest reading this. Personally, I’d log the data. A search on “Non-linear Regression R example” turned this up.

Posted 7 years ago

Thanks very much, will give those methods a shot!

Posted 7 years ago

If you really want to fit with the power law then you will require the nls function:

ModelFit <- nls(Sal ~ a*Rw^b),
data = YourDataSet,
start = list(a = 8000, b = -1)
)

summary(ModelFit)

The log-log fitting will be the best method for the simple case you have. I’m more of a SAS lover, so graphics will require overlaying as plot of the function with obtained parameters a,b. that is left to the interested reader 🙂

Posted 7 years ago

Oh my god!

People actually do this?!?!

😉

Posted 7 years ago

Wtf!!!

I mastered ABC easy enough, but on the basis of above, I think I’ll leave ‘R’ for a bit….

Posted 7 years ago

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0glomgHzv4[/video]

Posted 7 years ago

Seeing as you’re all so interested, this is the linear regression of the logs of my data, as djaustin suggested. Good, eh? 😉

Salinity Rw plot by Ginger F0x, on Flickr

Posted 7 years ago

Now try it with nls and not linearizing. It will be good for your R skills but won’t look as nice as the above. And your graphics are miles better than mine!

Posted 7 years ago

You mis-spelt resistivity… 😉

Posted 7 years ago