Recently I tried to fit some points which (from the plot) seems linearly distributed. The fit result (in R) is:
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-112223 -2532 2021 3698 83241
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -6.623e+03 7.136e+02 -9.282 <2e-16 ***
population 5.946e-02 4.278e-04 138.986 <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 12780 on 379 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.9808, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9807
F-statistic: 1.932e+04 on 1 and 379 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
With $R^2$ 0.98. Nice! BUT I checked the OLS assumptions and from the graph I have heteroscedasticity (top-left and bottom-left graph) and I have no normality of errors (top-right graph).
So I transformed the dependantdependent and independantindependent variables with log transformation. I now have a model which meet all the assumptions but it is more complicated (exponential fit?) and with lower $R^2$: 0.96.
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-0.37058 -0.06061 -0.00701 0.05532 0.44428
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -2.08467 0.06153 -33.88 <2e-16 ***
log_population 1.12146 0.01120 100.12 <2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 0.101 on 379 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.9636, Adjusted R-squared: 0.9635
F-statistic: 1.002e+04 on 1 and 379 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Which is the best? Is the first model wrong, and why?