Not usual piecewise linear regression

Question

I know that with fixed breakpoints (for the x variable), piecewise linear regression is easy and linear. However, for a variety of reasons, I would like to fix the breakpoints for the y variables. One reason is that there are natural candidates for the breaks for the y variable, but I have no clue about the x. Because there is a lot of noise, I do not want to just fit the reversed model.
I can write down the expression to be minimized, but it is nonlinear least squares, and the gradients look messy, involving the d/dr(1/r), etc. I want to avoid this. Does anyone know of a good solution to this problem? Maybe I have a missed a way of rewriting it to be linear?

Answer 1

You could just treat it as a nonlinear least squares problem. You don't need to calculate the gradient.

For example, consider the case of a linear spline with a single knot at known height $y_0$. Say the line to the left is $y = a + bx$ and the line to the right is $y = a' + b'x$. The knot occurs at $x_0 = (y_0 - a)/b$, which we don't know until we know $a$ and $b$, but that's okay. And the line to the right has to have $a' = y_0 - (y_0 - a)(b'/b)$. There are three parameters to estimate: $a$, $b$, $b'$ (well, also the residual SD).

There are some issues here: I'd prefer $b \ne 0$ and $b' \ne 0$, and maybe they should be the same sign.

In R, it's relatively easy to fit such a model using nls (especially with simulated data where I know the truth). The hardest part is defining a function for the linear spline.

Here's an example:

# function defining the linear spline
f <- 
function(x, theta, y0=2)
{
  a <- theta[1]
  b <- theta[2]
  bp <- theta[3]
  if(b == 0) stop("need b != 0")
  x0 <- (y0-a)/b
  ifelse(x <= x0, a+b*x, y0-(y0-a)*bp/b + bp*x)
}

# simulate data
theta <- c(1, 0.5, 2)
x <- seq(-5, 5, len=251)
y <- f(x, theta) + rnorm(length(x))
dat <- data.frame(x=x, y=y)

# fit by nonlinear least squares
out <- nls(y ~ f(x, theta, 2), data=dat, start=list(theta=c(1, 0.5, 2)))

# plot data plus fitted spline
plot(x, y, las=1)
lines(x, f(x, c(1,0.5,2), 2), lwd=2, col="blue")
lines(x, f(x, coef(out), 2), lwd=2, col="red", lty=2)
legend("topleft", lwd=2, col=c("blue", "red"), lty=1:2,
       c("truth", "fitted"))

Here's the figure: