# How to handle multicollinearity in a linear regression with all dummy variables?

First, a little background:

I'm a college paintball coach and I'm trying to identify which of my players have the biggest impact on various statistics (e.g. winning percentage etc).

In order to do this I've put together a csv file with the following columns for each point that we play (you can use hockey as a mental model for how this works and each point as a "shift"):

• Win/Loss/Draw (-1 for loss, 0 for draw, 1 for win)
• Dummy variable for team A (1 if we are playing them, 0 if we are not)
• Dummy variables for each other team we play
• Dummy variable for each player on our side during that point

The dummy variable for each team is to that we can isolate better teams from the impact of each player.

For example, the headers would look like this

WinLoss,P_1,P_2,P_3,P_4,T_5,T_1,T_2,T_3


If Game 1 vs Team 1 had the following outcome:

Point 1: Players 1, 2 and 3 lost
Point 2: Players 1, 2 and 4 won
Point 3: Players 3, 4 and 5 lost

would look like this

WinLoss,P_1,P_2,P_3,P_4,T_5,T_1,T_2,T_3
0,1,1,1,0,0,1,0,0
1,1,1,0,1,0,1,0,0
0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0


In the actual data set the players are in groups of 5 but the above gives the general format. We try to keep players together on the same "lines" as we assume that helps build both team rapport and communication.

I then ran the below:

mydata <- read.csv('lines_data.csv')
attach(mydata)
wins2 = lm(WinLoss ~ P_1 + P_2 + P_3+ P_4 + P_5 + T_1 + T_2 + T_3 + T_4)
summary(wins2)


I noticed recently that if I change the order of the players, I get different co-efficient values for each player.

Some searching here on Cross Validated led me to this question.

It makes sense that there is a high degree of multicollinearity between the player dummy variables as the players are on the field in "lines"/"shifts" as mentioned above.

My question is to how to account for this when running the regression? Do I just need more data? Do I need more dummy variables?

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How can nominal variables be correlated? Are you just using "collinear" as a catch-all for any kind of association here? –  Macro Jun 15 '12 at 12:39
Is the purpose to draw information from the parameters or to predict the outcome of future games? If you are predicting the you don't need to worry about multicollinearity(you should of course still not include the reference dummy variable.) On another note you should use multinomial logistic regression and not linear regression since you are looking at a categorical output variable. To help you further please provide an example of your data. –  pgericson Jun 15 '12 at 17:24
@Macro: I added simplified format of how I am formatting the data. My understanding of "collinear" is that there are independent variables that correlate to each other. –  alexpotato Jun 15 '12 at 19:28
@pgericson: The goal is to identify who our "best" players are. Unlike other sports where there is a center of the action, it's sometimes hard to identify who is benefiting the team so we are hoping that regression will help us identify undervalued players. –  alexpotato Jun 15 '12 at 19:30