[R] Deviance function in regression trees

2006-08-28 Thread Solomon Dobrowski 
Hello all. I have heard over and over that CART and its various tree-like
brethren are "non-parametric" techniques. When I read the chapter in
Chambers and Hastie on tree-based models it states that tree-based models
can be generalized (GTMs) in a manner similar to GLMs by specifying a
different deviance function to distributions other than the gaussian error
distribution ( section 9.4.3).  I have an application in which the response
variable is a continuous variable representing tree counts within a unit
area and thus would be best described by a poisson distribution. The error
distribution for this data is not gaussian. If this is the case, will the
gaussian error distribution used in most regression tree packages, be
appropriate? Are there ways to specify the error distribution in R or Should
I log transform the response variable?  If the specification of error
distribution in regression trees is important, than are these techniques
truly " non-parametric". Thanks for your inputs. 


Solomon Dobrowski
Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC)
John Muir Institute of the Environment
University of California, Davis
530 754 9354


[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

__
R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

[R] Comparing partial response curves from GAM

2006-06-20 Thread Solomon Dobrowski 
Hello all, I was wondering if anyone is aware of formal approaches and tools
for comparing partial response curves produced in GAM? My interest is in
determining if two partial response curves are "statistically" different. I
recognize that point-wise standard error estimates can be produced using the
GAM package but Im not certain how to translate this into a statistical test
for the entire curve. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thanks. Solomon

Solomon Dobrowski
Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC)
John Muir Institute of the Environment
University of California, Davis
530 754 9354


[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

__
R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html