How to use anova for two models comparison?

Question

How should I understand the anova result when comparing two models?

Example:

  Res.Df    RSS Df Sum of Sq      F    Pr(>F)    
1      9 54.032                                  
2      7  4.632  2      49.4 37.329 0.0001844 ***

The manpage states: "Compute analysis of variance (or deviance) tables for one or more fitted model objects." However, out professor mentioned that it may be employed for model comparison - that's what I intend to do.

Hence I assume I could use anova(model1, model2) and obtain a p-value which tells me whether I should reject the null hypothesis: "the models are the same".

May I state that if the p-value is less then (let's say) 0.05, the models differ significantly?

Answer 1

Assuming your models are nested (i.e. same outcome variable and model 2 contains all the variables of model 1 plus 2 additional variables), then the ANOVA results state that the 2 additional variables jointly account for enough variance that you can reject the null hypothesis that the coefficients for both variables equal 0. This is effectively what you said. If both coefficients equal 0 then the models are the same.

Just as an additional note, in case you weren't aware, ANOVA is always equivalent to doing model comparisons. When you are looking at the ANOVA for a single model it gives you the effects for each predictor variable. That is equivalent to doing a model comparison between your full model and a model removing one of the variables. i.e. $Model 1: y=a+bx_1+cx_2+dx_3; Model 2: y=a+bx_1+cx_2$ will give you the sum of squares (type III) and test statistic for $x_3$. Just note that R gives you type I sum of squares. If you need type III, use car::Anova or use anova and keep changing the order of the variables in the model and only take the sum of squares for the last variable.