The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by METANET, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]metanet.ch.
Marketing analytics with greybox
Ivan Svetunkov
2024-08-27
One of the reasons why I have started the greybox
package is to use it for marketing research and marketing analytics. The
common problem that I face, when working with these courses is analysing
the data measured in different scales. While R handles numeric scales
natively, the work with categorical is not satisfactory. Yes, I know
that there are packages that implement some of the functions, but I
wanted to have them in one place without the need to install a lot of
packages and satisfy the dependencies. After all, what’s the point in
installing a package for Cramer’s V, when it can be calculated with two
lines of code? So, here’s a brief explanation of the functions for
marketing analytics.
I will use mtcars dataset for the examples, but we will
transform some of the variables into factors:
mtcarsData <- as.data.frame(mtcars)
mtcarsData$vs <- factor(mtcarsData$vs, levels=c(0,1), labels=c("v","s"))
mtcarsData$am <- factor(mtcarsData$am, levels=c(0,1), labels=c("a","m"))
Analysing the relation between the two variables in categorical
scales
Cramer’s V
Cramer’s V measures the relation between two variables in categorical
scale. It is implemented in the cramer() function. It
returns the value in a range of 0 to 1 (1 - when the two categorical
variables are linearly associated with each other, 0 - otherwise),
Chi-Squared statistics from the chisq.test(), the
respective p-value and the number of degrees of freedom. The tested
hypothesis in this case is formulated as:
\(H_0: V=0\) (the variables don’t
have association);
\(H_1: V\neq 0\) (there is an
association between the variables).
Here’s what we get when trying to find the association between the
engine and transmission in the mtcars data:
cramer(mtcarsData$vs, mtcarsData$am)
#> Cramer's V: 0
#> Chi^2 statistics = 0.3475, df: 1, p-value: 0.5555
Judging by this output, the association between these two variables
is very low (close to zero) and is not statistically significant.
Cramer’s V can also be used for the data in numerical scales. In
general, this might be not the most suitable solution, but this might be
useful when you have a small number of values in the data. For example,
the variable gear in mtcars is numerical, but
it has only three options (3, 4 and 5). Here’s what Cramer’s V tells us
in the case of gear and am:
cramer(mtcarsData$am, mtcarsData$gear)
#> Cramer's V: 0.7808
#> Chi^2 statistics = 20.9447, df: 2, p-value: 0
As we see, the value is high in this case (0.809), and the null
hypothesis is rejected on 5%. So we can conclude that there is a
relation between the two variables. This does not mean that one variable
causes the other one, but they both might be driven by something else
(do more expensive cars have less gears but the automatic
transmission?).
Plotting categorical variables
While R allows plotting two categorical variables against each other,
the plot is hard to read and is not very helpful (in my opinion):
plot(table(mtcarsData$am,mtcarsData$gear))
So I have created a function that produces a heat map for two
categorical variables. It is called tableplot():
tableplot(mtcarsData$am,mtcarsData$gear)
It is based on table() function and uses the frequencies
inside the table for the colours:
table(mtcarsData$am,mtcarsData$gear) / length(mtcarsData$am)
#>
#> 3 4 5
#> a 0.46875 0.12500 0.00000
#> m 0.00000 0.25000 0.15625
The darker sectors mean that there is a higher concentration of
values, while the white ones correspond to zeroes. So, in our example,
we see that the majority of cars have automatic transmissions with three
gears. Furthermore, the plot shows that there is some sort of relation
between the two variables: the cars with automatic transmissions have
the lower number of gears, while the ones with the manual have the
higher number of gears (something we’ve already noticed in the previous
subsection).
Association between the categorical and numerical variables
While Cramer’s V can also be used for the measurement of association
between the variables in different scales, there are better instruments.
For example, some analysts recommend using intraclass
correlation coefficient when measuring the relation between the
numerical and categorical variables. But there is a simpler option,
which involves calculating the coefficient of multiple correlation
between the variables. This is implemented in mcor()
function of greybox. The y variable should be
numerical, while x can be of any type. What the function
then does is expands all the factors and runs a regression via
.lm.fit() function, returning the square root of the
coefficient of determination. If the variables are linearly related,
then the returned value will be close to one. Otherwise it will be
closet to zero. The function also returns the F statistics from the
regression, the associated p-value and the number of degrees of freedom
(the hypothesis is formulated similarly to cramer()
function).
Here’s how it works:
mcor(mtcarsData$am,mtcarsData$mpg)
#> Multiple correlations value: 0.5998
#> F-statistics = 16.8603, df: 1, df resid: 30, p-value: 3e-04
In this example, the simple linear regression of mpg
from the set of dummies is constructed, and we can conclude that there
is a linear relation between the variables, and that this relation is
statistically significant.
Association between several variables
Measures of association
When you deal with datasets (i.e. data frames or matrices), then you
can use cor() function in order to calculate the
correlation coefficients between the variables in the data. But when you
have a mixture of numerical and categorical variables, the situation
becomes more difficult, as the correlation does not make sense for the
latter. This motivated me to create a function that uses either
cor(), or cramer(), or mcor()
functions depending on the types of data (see discussions of
cramer() and mcor() above). The function is
called association() or assoc() and returns
three matrices: the values of the measures of association, their
p-values and the types of the functions used between the variables.
Here’s an example:
assocValues <- assoc(mtcarsData)
print(assocValues,digits=2)
#> Associations:
#> values:
#> mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
#> mpg 1.00 0.86 -0.85 -0.78 0.68 -0.87 0.42 0.66 0.60 0.66 0.67
#> cyl 0.86 1.00 0.92 0.84 0.70 0.78 0.59 0.79 0.46 0.48 0.48
#> disp -0.85 0.92 1.00 0.79 -0.71 0.89 -0.43 0.71 0.59 0.77 0.56
#> hp -0.78 0.84 0.79 1.00 -0.45 0.66 -0.71 0.72 0.24 0.66 0.79
#> drat 0.68 0.70 -0.71 -0.45 1.00 -0.71 0.09 0.44 0.71 0.83 0.33
#> wt -0.87 0.78 0.89 0.66 -0.71 1.00 -0.17 0.55 0.69 0.66 0.61
#> qsec 0.42 0.59 -0.43 -0.71 0.09 -0.17 1.00 0.74 0.23 0.63 0.67
#> vs 0.66 0.79 0.71 0.72 0.44 0.55 0.74 1.00 0.00 0.57 0.57
#> am 0.60 0.46 0.59 0.24 0.71 0.69 0.23 0.00 1.00 0.78 0.19
#> gear 0.66 0.48 0.77 0.66 0.83 0.66 0.63 0.57 0.78 1.00 0.32
#> carb 0.67 0.48 0.56 0.79 0.33 0.61 0.67 0.57 0.19 0.32 1.00
#>
#> p-values:
#> mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
#> mpg 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01
#> cyl 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.01
#> disp 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.07
#> hp 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.18 0.00 0.00
#> drat 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.62 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.66
#> wt 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.34 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.02
#> qsec 0.02 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.62 0.34 0.00 0.00 0.21 0.00 0.01
#> vs 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.56 0.00 0.01
#> am 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.18 0.00 0.00 0.21 0.56 0.00 0.00 0.28
#> gear 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.09
#> carb 0.01 0.01 0.07 0.00 0.66 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.28 0.09 0.00
#>
#> types:
#> mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec
#> mpg "none" "mcor" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson"
#> cyl "mcor" "none" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> disp "pearson" "mcor" "none" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson"
#> hp "pearson" "mcor" "pearson" "none" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson"
#> drat "pearson" "mcor" "pearson" "pearson" "none" "pearson" "pearson"
#> wt "pearson" "mcor" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "none" "pearson"
#> qsec "pearson" "mcor" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "pearson" "none"
#> vs "mcor" "cramer" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> am "mcor" "cramer" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> gear "mcor" "cramer" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> carb "mcor" "cramer" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> vs am gear carb
#> mpg "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> cyl "cramer" "cramer" "cramer" "cramer"
#> disp "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> hp "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> drat "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> wt "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> qsec "mcor" "mcor" "mcor" "mcor"
#> vs "none" "cramer" "cramer" "cramer"
#> am "cramer" "none" "cramer" "cramer"
#> gear "cramer" "cramer" "none" "cramer"
#> carb "cramer" "cramer" "cramer" "none"
One thing to note is that the function considers numerical variables
as categorical, when they only have up to 10 unique values. This is
useful in case of number of gears in the dataset.
In addition, there is a parameter method in the
function, which forces it to apply a specific measure of association to
all the variables. This can be either Pearson / Spearman / Kendall
correlation (using cor.test() function) or Cramer’s V
(cramer() function from greybox). Note
however, that it might not produce anything meaningful, when you apply
the function with some methods to variables in categorical scales
(e.g. correlation does not make sense between price and colour).
Partial correlations
Sometimes you might want to get an idea of the pure correlation
between two variables, x and y - the one that
is free of the potential influence of other variables, for example, some
variable z. This is called “partial correlation”. It is
based on the two regression models: y = b0 + b1 z + e and x = a0 + a1 z
+ u - and then on the calculation of the Pearson’s correlations between
the residuals of models, cor(e,u). This is what the
function pcor() does, using all the provided variables for
z. It returns a matrix of partial correlations and a matrix
of the respective p-values from the cor.test():
pcorValues <- pcor(mtcars)
print(pcorValues,digits=2)
#> Partial correlations using pearson method:
#> values:
#> mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
#> mpg 1.00 0.10 0.16 -0.20 0.18 -0.40 0.48 0.02 0.29 0.16 -0.07
#> cyl 0.10 1.00 0.35 0.32 0.00 -0.17 0.40 -0.52 -0.17 -0.13 0.21
#> disp 0.16 0.35 1.00 0.54 0.10 0.76 -0.45 -0.10 -0.07 0.06 -0.66
#> hp -0.20 0.32 0.54 1.00 -0.03 -0.30 0.02 0.27 0.12 0.16 0.50
#> drat 0.18 0.00 0.10 -0.03 1.00 -0.13 0.35 -0.01 0.22 0.26 0.18
#> wt -0.40 -0.17 0.76 -0.30 -0.13 1.00 0.75 -0.06 0.01 -0.15 0.62
#> qsec 0.48 0.40 -0.45 0.02 0.35 0.75 1.00 0.40 -0.27 0.26 -0.46
#> vs 0.02 -0.52 -0.10 0.27 -0.01 -0.06 0.40 1.00 -0.23 0.00 -0.08
#> am 0.29 -0.17 -0.07 0.12 0.22 0.01 -0.27 -0.23 1.00 0.38 -0.07
#> gear 0.16 -0.13 0.06 0.16 0.26 -0.15 0.26 0.00 0.38 1.00 0.42
#> carb -0.07 0.21 -0.66 0.50 0.18 0.62 -0.46 -0.08 -0.07 0.42 1.00
#>
#> p-values:
#> mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
#> mpg 0.00 0.60 0.38 0.27 0.33 0.02 0.01 0.92 0.10 0.37 0.71
#> cyl 0.60 0.00 0.05 0.07 0.98 0.34 0.02 0.00 0.36 0.47 0.25
#> disp 0.38 0.05 0.00 0.00 0.57 0.00 0.01 0.57 0.71 0.72 0.00
#> hp 0.27 0.07 0.00 0.00 0.88 0.09 0.92 0.14 0.52 0.39 0.00
#> drat 0.33 0.98 0.57 0.88 0.00 0.46 0.05 0.94 0.23 0.15 0.32
#> wt 0.02 0.34 0.00 0.09 0.46 0.00 0.00 0.73 0.94 0.41 0.00
#> qsec 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.92 0.05 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.13 0.14 0.01
#> vs 0.92 0.00 0.57 0.14 0.94 0.73 0.02 0.00 0.20 0.99 0.66
#> am 0.10 0.36 0.71 0.52 0.23 0.94 0.13 0.20 0.00 0.03 0.71
#> gear 0.37 0.47 0.72 0.39 0.15 0.41 0.14 0.99 0.03 0.00 0.02
#> carb 0.71 0.25 0.00 0.00 0.32 0.00 0.01 0.66 0.71 0.02 0.00
These values might be useful on the stages of the variables
selection.
Plots of association between several variables
Similarly to the problem with cor(), scatterplot matrix
(produced using plot()) is not meaningful in case of a
mixture of variables:
It makes sense to use scatterplot in case of numeric variables,
tableplot() in case of categorical and
boxplot() in case of a mixture. So, there is the function
spread() in greybox that creates something
more meaningful. It uses the same algorithm as assoc()
function, but produces plots instead of calculating measures of
association. So, gear will be considered as categorical and
the function will produce either boxplot() or
tableplot(), when plotting it against other variables.
Here’s an example:
This plot demonstrates, for example, that the number of carburetors
influences fuel consumption (something that we could not have spotted in
the case of plot()). Notice also, that the number of gears
influences the fuel consumption in a non-linear relation as well. So
constructing the model with dummy variables for the number of gears
might be a reasonable thing to do.
The function also has the parameter log, which will
transform all the numerical variables using logarithms, which is handy,
when you suspect the non-linear relation between the variables. Finally,
there is a parameter histogram, which will plot either
histograms, or barplots on the diagonal.
spread(mtcarsData, histograms=TRUE, log=TRUE)
The plot demonstrates that the disp has a strong
non-linear relation with mpg, and, similarly,
drat and hp also influence mpg in
a non-linear fashion.
Regression diagnostics
One of the problems of linear regression that can be diagnosed prior
to the model construction is multicollinearity. The conventional way of
doing this diagnostics is via calculating the variance inflation factor
(VIF) after constructing the model. However, VIF is not easy to
interpret, because it lies in \((1,
\infty)\). Coefficients of determination from the linear
regression models of explanatory variables are easier to interpret and
work with. If such a coefficient is equal to one, then there are some
perfectly correlated explanatory variables in the dataset. If it is
equal to zero, then they are not linearly related.
There is a function determination() or
determ() in greybox that returns the set of
coefficients of determination for the explanatory variables. The good
thing is that this can be done before constructing any model. In our
example, the first column, mpg is the response variable, so
we can diagnose the multicollinearity the following way:
determination(mtcarsData[,-1])
#> cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am
#> 0.9349544 0.9537470 0.8982917 0.7036703 0.9340582 0.8671619 0.8017720 0.7924392
#> gear carb
#> 0.8133441 0.8735577
As we can see from the output above, disp is the most
linearly related with the variables, so including it in the model might
cause the multicollinearity, which will make the estimates of parameters
less efficient.
These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.