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This vignette illustrates the use of the PLN
function and the methods accompanying the R6 class PLNfit
.
From the statistical point of view, the function PLN
adjusts a multivariate Poisson lognormal model to a table of counts, possibly after correcting for effects of offsets and covariates. PLN
is the building block for all the multivariate models found in the PLNmodels
package: having a basic understanding of both the mathematical background and the associated set of R
functions is a good place to start.
The packages required for the analysis are PLNmodels plus some others for data manipulation and representation:
library(PLNmodels) library(ggplot2) library(corrplot)
We illustrate our point with the trichoptera data set, a full description of which can be found in the corresponding vignette. Data preparation is also detailed in the specific vignette.
data(trichoptera) trichoptera <- prepare_data(trichoptera$Abundance, trichoptera$Covariate)
The trichoptera
data frame stores a matrix of counts (trichoptera$Abundance
), a matrix of offsets (trichoptera$Offset
) and some vectors of covariates (trichoptera$Wind
, trichoptera$Temperature
, etc.)
The multivariate Poisson lognormal model (in short PLN, see @AiH89) relates some $p$-dimensional observation vectors $\mathbf{Y}_i$ to some $p$-dimensional vectors of Gaussian latent variables $\mathbf{Z}_i$ as follows
\begin{equation} \begin{array}{rcl} \text{latent space } & \mathbf{Z}i \sim \mathcal{N}({\boldsymbol\mu},\boldsymbol\Sigma), \ \text{observation space } & Y{ij} | Z_{ij} \quad \text{indep.} & \mathbf{Y}_i | \mathbf{Z}_i\sim\mathcal{P}\left(\exp{\mathbf{Z}_i}\right). \end{array} \end{equation}
The parameter ${\boldsymbol\mu}$ corresponds to the main effects and the latent covariance matrix $\boldsymbol\Sigma$ describes the underlying residual structure of dependence between the $p$ variables. The following figure provides insights about the role played by the different layers
library(grid) library(gridExtra) library(dplyr) set.seed(20171110) x <- rnorm(100) y <- rnorm(100) b <- data.frame(x = x + y, y = y) / 1 mu <- 0 ## data.perfect <- as.data.frame((b + matrix(rep(mu, each = length(x)), ncol = 2))) p.latent <- ggplot(data.perfect, aes(x, y)) + geom_point() + ggtitle(expression(Latent~Space~(Z))) .rpois <- function(lambda) { unlist(lapply(exp(lambda), function(x) {rpois(1, x)})) } observation <- as.data.frame(lapply(data.perfect, .rpois)) mapped.parameter <- as.data.frame(lapply(data.perfect, exp)) ## segment between mapped and observed data segment.data <- cbind(mapped.parameter, observation) names(segment.data) <- c("x", "y", "xend", "yend") ## Mapped parameters p.mapped <- ggplot(mapped.parameter, aes(x, y)) + geom_point(col = "red") + ggtitle(expression(Observation~Space~(exp(Z)))) ## Observations only obs <- group_by(observation, x, y) obs <- dplyr::summarize(obs, count = n()) p.observation.only <- ggplot(obs, aes(x, y)) + geom_point(aes(size = count)) + ggtitle(Observation~Space~(Y)~+'noise') + theme(legend.position = c(.95, .95), legend.justification = c(1, 1), legend.background = element_rect(color = "transparent"), legend.box.background = element_blank()) ## Observations and latent parameters p.observation.mixed <- p.observation.only + geom_point(data = mapped.parameter, color = "red", alpha = 0.5) + geom_segment(data = segment.data, aes(xend = xend, yend = yend), color = "black", alpha = 0.2) + ggtitle(Observation~Space~(Y==P(exp(Z)))~+'noise') grid.arrange(p.latent + labs(x = "species 1", y = "species 2"), p.mapped + labs(x = "species 1", y = "species 2"), p.observation.mixed + labs(x = "species 1", y = "species 2"), p.observation.only + labs(x = "species 1", y = "species 2"), ncol = 2)
This model generalizes naturally to a formulation closer to a multivariate generalized linear model, where the main effect is due to a linear combination of $d$ covariates $\mathbf{x}_i$ (including a vector of intercepts). We also let the possibility to add some offsets for the $p$ variables in in each sample, that is $\mathbf{o}_i$. Hence, the previous model generalizes to
\begin{equation} \mathbf{Y}_i | \mathbf{Z}_i \sim \mathcal{P}\left(\exp{\mathbf{Z}_i}\right), \qquad \mathbf{Z}_i \sim \mathcal{N}({\mathbf{o}_i + \mathbf{x}_i^\top\mathbf{B}},\boldsymbol\Sigma), \ \end{equation} where $\mathbf{B}$ is a $d\times p$ matrix of regression parameters. When all individuals $i=1,\dots,n$ are stacked together, the data matrices available to feed the model are
Inference in PLN then focuses on the regression parameters $\mathbf{B}$ and on the covariance matrix $\boldsymbol\Sigma$.
Technically speaking, we adopt in PLNmodels a variational strategy to approximate the log-likelihood function and optimize the consecutive variational surrogate of the log-likelihood with a gradient-ascent-based approach. To this end, we rely on the CCSA algorithm of @Svan02 implemented in the C++ library [@nlopt], which we link to the package.
The standard PLN model described above is adjusted with the function PLN
. We now review its usage on a the trichoptera data set.
In order to become familiar with the function PLN
and its outputs, let us first fit a simple PLN model with just an intercept for each species:
myPLN <- PLN(Abundance ~ 1, trichoptera)
Note the use of the formula
object to specify the model: the vector $\boldsymbol\mu$ of main effects in the mathematical formulation (one per column species) is specified in the call with the term ~ 1
in the right-hand-side of the formula. Abundance
is a variable in the data frame trichoptera
corresponding to a matrix of 17 columns and the response in the model, occurring on the left-hand-side of the formula.
PLNfit
objectmyPLN
is an R6
object with class PLNfit
, which comes with a couple of methods, as recalled when printing/showing such an object in the R
console:
myPLN
See also ?PLNfit
for more comprehensive information.
Accessing public fields of a PLNfit
object can be done just like with a traditional list, e.g.,
c(myPLN$loglik, myPLN$BIC, myPLN$ICL) myPLN$criteria
We provide a set of S3-methods for PLNfit
that mimic the standard (G)LM-like interface of R::stats
, which we present now.
One can access the fitted value of the counts (Abundance
-- $\hat{\mathbf{Y}}$) and check that the algorithm basically learned correctly from the data^[We use a log-log scale in our plot in order not to give an excessive importance to the higher counts in the fit]:
data.frame( fitted = as.vector(fitted(myPLN)), observed = as.vector(trichoptera$Abundance) ) %>% ggplot(aes(x = observed, y = fitted)) + geom_point(size = .5, alpha =.25 ) + scale_x_log10() + scale_y_log10() + theme_bw() + annotation_logticks()
The residual correlation matrix better displays as an image matrix:
myPLN %>% sigma() %>% cov2cor() %>% corrplot()
It is also possible to use observation weights like in standard (G)LMs:
myPLN_weighted <- PLN( Abundance ~ 1, data = trichoptera, weights = runif(nrow(trichoptera)), control = PLN_param(trace = 0) ) data.frame( unweighted = as.vector(fitted(myPLN)), weighted = as.vector(fitted(myPLN_weighted)) ) %>% ggplot(aes(x = unweighted, y = weighted)) + geom_point(size = .5, alpha =.25 ) + scale_x_log10() + scale_y_log10() + theme_bw() + annotation_logticks()
For ecological count data, it is generally a good advice to include the sampling effort via an offset term whenever available, otherwise samples are not necessarily comparable:
myPLN_offsets <- PLN(Abundance ~ 1 + offset(log(Offset)), data = trichoptera, control = PLN_param(trace = 0))
Note that we use the function offset
with a log-transform of the total counts[^1] since it acts in the latent layer of the model. Obviously the model with offsets is better since the log-likelihood is higher with the same number of parameters^[In PLNmodels the R-squared is a pseudo-R-squared that can only be trusted between model where the same offsets term was used]:
rbind( myPLN$criteria, myPLN_offsets$criteria ) %>% knitr::kable()
Let us try to correct for the wind effect in our model:
myPLN_wind <- PLN(Abundance ~ 1 + Wind + offset(log(Offset)), data = trichoptera)
When we compare the models, the gain is clear in terms of log-likelihood. However, the BIC chooses not to include this variable:
rbind( myPLN_offsets$criteria, myPLN_wind$criteria ) %>% knitr::kable()
It is possible to change a bit the parametrization used for modeling the residual covariance matrix $\boldsymbol\Sigma$, and thus reduce the total number of parameters used in the model. By default, the residual covariance is fully parameterized (hence $p \times (p+1)/2$ parameters). However, we can chose to only model the variances of the species and not the covariances, by means of a diagonal matrix $\boldsymbol\Sigma_D$ with only $p$ parameters. In an extreme situation, we may also chose a single variance parameter for the whole matrix $\boldsymbol\Sigma = \sigma \mathbf{I}_p$. This can be tuned in PLN
with the control
argument, a list controlling various aspects of the underlying optimization process:
myPLN_spherical <- PLN( Abundance ~ 1 + offset(log(Offset)), data = trichoptera, control = PLN_param(covariance = "spherical", trace = 0) )
myPLN_diagonal <- PLN( Abundance ~ 1 + offset(log(Offset)), data = trichoptera, control = PLN_param(covariance = "diagonal", trace = 0) )
Note that, by default, the model chosen is covariance = "spherical"
, so that the two following calls are equivalents:
myPLN_default <- PLN(Abundance ~ 1, data = trichoptera, ) myPLN_full <- PLN(Abundance ~ 1, data = trichoptera, control = PLN_param(covariance = "full"))
Different covariance models can then be compared with the usual criteria: it seems that the gain brought by passing from a diagonal matrix to a fully parameterized covariance is not worth having so many additional parameters:
rbind( myPLN_offsets$criteria, myPLN_diagonal$criteria, myPLN_spherical$criteria ) %>% as.data.frame(row.names = c("full", "diagonal", "spherical")) %>% knitr::kable()
A final model that we can try is the diagonal one with the wind as a covariate, which gives a slight improvement.
myPLN_final <- PLN( Abundance ~ 1 + Wind + offset(log(Offset)), data = trichoptera, control = PLN_param(covariance = "diagonal", trace = 0) ) rbind( myPLN_wind$criteria, myPLN_diagonal$criteria, myPLN_final$criteria ) %>% knitr::kable()
[^1]: Note that if the offset is not computed on the same scale as the count, you might need a different transformation than the log. To ensure that the offset are on the count-scale, you can use the scale = "count"
argument in prepare_data()
, see also the corresponding vignette.
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