I have ran a glm in R, and near the bottom of the summary() output, it states:
(Dispersion parameter for Gamma family taken to be 1.680014)
What does this mean/represent?
I have ran a glm in R, and near the bottom of the summary() output, it states:
(Dispersion parameter for Gamma family taken to be 1.680014)
What does this mean/represent?
Gamma distribution defined by two parameters - shape ($\alpha$) and rate ($\beta$).
There is alternative parameterization through mean ($\mu$) and shape, which is used in GLM.
We take $\mu = \alpha/\beta$ and put it into place of rate (as $\beta = \alpha/\mu$), resulting in function $Gamma(\mu,\alpha)$.
In R GLM assumes shape to be a constant (as linear regression assumes constant variance). To satisfy this assumption dispersion ($\phi$) is introduced: $$ \phi = \frac{1}{\alpha} $$
For the simple case glm(x ~ 1, family = Gamma(link = 'identity))
, summary.glm
gives you $\text{estimate}$, that is equal to $\mu$ (note that default link is 'inverse' and estimate = $1/\mu$) and $\text{dispersion}$ is $\phi$.
x
. But in general effects estimates of explanatory variables would change in accordance with model.
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Commented
Oct 23, 2017 at 7:00