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If I have a categorical variable with three levels (CatXVar) that I recode into two dummy variables (NYXVar and BostonXVar)such that:

YVar ContXVar  CatXVar NYXVar BostonXVar
0.23 10        NY      1      0
0.1  22.3      Boston  0      1
0.52 11.9      London  0      0

and I want to see whether CatXVar affects the significance of any relationship between YVar and ContXVar, should I run two separate regressions of:

Yvar ~ ContXVar + NYXVar

and

Yvar ~ ContXVar + BostonXVar

or should I run the regression as:

Yvar ~ ContXVar + NYXVar + BostonXVar
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  • $\begingroup$ If you exclude the intercept from your model you can run it using CarXVar as the predictor. $\endgroup$
    – user78229
    Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 19:32
  • $\begingroup$ I've read that I should convert k-level categorical variables into k-1 binary dummy variables though? $\endgroup$
    – Kaleb
    Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 8:06
  • $\begingroup$ Not if you don't have an intercept. $\endgroup$
    – user78229
    Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 9:52
  • $\begingroup$ How do I get rid of the intercept in R with glm? $\endgroup$
    – Kaleb
    Commented Nov 2, 2015 at 12:50
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    $\begingroup$ You can remove the intercept by including -1 in the model specification. You might want to consider reading this before doing that. Yvar ~ ContXVar + NYXVar + BostonXVar seems to be the safe bet here. $\endgroup$
    – horseoftheyear
    Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

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You can remove the intercept, as suggested in the comments, by including -1 in the model specification. However, you might want to consider reading this before doing that.

Yvar ~ ContXVar + NYXVar + BostonXVar seems to be the safe bet here.

Running two separate regressions essentially means you're estimating two separate models as you don't account for the New York/Boston effect respectively.

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