How are the standard errors of coefficients calculated in a regression?

Question

For my own understanding, I am interested in manually replicating the calculation of the standard errors of estimated coefficients as, for example, come with the output of the lm() function in R, but haven't been able to pin it down. What is the formula / implementation used?

Answer 1

The linear model is written as $$ \left| \begin{array}{l} \mathbf{y} = \mathbf{X} \mathbf{\beta} + \mathbf{\epsilon} \\ \mathbf{\epsilon} \sim N(0, \sigma^2 \mathbf{I}), \end{array} \right.$$ where $\mathbf{y}$ denotes the vector of responses, $\mathbf{\beta}$ is the vector of fixed effects parameters, $\mathbf{X}$ is the corresponding design matrix whose columns are the values of the explanatory variables, and $\mathbf{\epsilon}$ is the vector of random errors.

It is well known that an estimate of $\mathbf{\beta}$ is given by (refer, e.g., to the wikipedia article) $$\hat{\mathbf{\beta}} = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{y}.$$ Hence $$ \textrm{Var}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \;\sigma^2 \mathbf{I} \; \mathbf{X} (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X}) (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}, $$ [reminder: $\textrm{Var}(AX)=A\times \textrm{Var}(X) \times A′$, for some random vector $X$ and some non-random matrix $A$]

so that $$ \widehat{\textrm{Var}}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = \hat{\sigma}^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}, $$ where $\hat{\sigma}^2$ can be obtained by the Mean Square Error (MSE) in the ANOVA table.

---

Example with a simple linear regression in R

#------generate one data set with epsilon ~ N(0, 0.25)------
seed <- 1152 #seed
n <- 100     #nb of observations
a <- 5       #intercept
b <- 2.7     #slope

set.seed(seed)
epsilon <- rnorm(n, mean=0, sd=sqrt(0.25))
x <- sample(x=c(0, 1), size=n, replace=TRUE)
y <- a + b * x + epsilon
#-----------------------------------------------------------

#------using lm------
mod <- lm(y ~ x)
#--------------------

#------using the explicit formulas------
X <- cbind(1, x)
betaHat <- solve(t(X) %*% X) %*% t(X) %*% y
var_betaHat <- anova(mod)[[3]][2] * solve(t(X) %*% X)
#---------------------------------------

#------comparison------
#estimate
> mod$coef
(Intercept)           x 
   5.020261    2.755577 

> c(betaHat[1], betaHat[2])
[1] 5.020261 2.755577

#standard error
> summary(mod)$coefficients[, 2]
(Intercept)           x 
 0.06596021  0.09725302 

> sqrt(diag(var_betaHat))
                    x 
0.06596021 0.09725302 
#----------------------

---

When there is a single explanatory variable, the model reduces to $$y_i = a + bx_i + \epsilon_i, \qquad i = 1, \dotsc, n$$ and $$\mathbf{X} = \left( \begin{array}{cc} 1 & x_1 \\ 1 & x_2 \\ \vdots & \vdots \\ 1 & x_n \end{array} \right), \qquad \mathbf{\beta} = \left( \begin{array}{c} a\\b \end{array} \right)$$ so that $$(\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \frac{1}{n\sum x_i^2 - (\sum x_i)^2} \left( \begin{array}{cc} \sum x_i^2 & -\sum x_i \\ -\sum x_i & n \end{array} \right)$$ and formulas become more transparant. For example, the standard error of the estimated slope is $$\sqrt{\widehat{\textrm{Var}}(\hat{b})} = \sqrt{[\hat{\sigma}^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}]_{22}} = \sqrt{\frac{n \hat{\sigma}^2}{n\sum x_i^2 - (\sum x_i)^2}}.$$

> num <- n * anova(mod)[[3]][2]
> denom <- n * sum(x^2) - sum(x)^2
> sqrt(num / denom)
[1] 0.09725302

Answer 2

The formulae for these can be found in any intermediate text on statistics, in particular, you can find them in Sheather (2009, Chapter 5), from where the following exercise is also taken (page 138).

The following R code computes the coefficient estimates and their standard errors manually

dfData <- as.data.frame(
  read.csv("https://gattonweb.uky.edu/sheather/book/docs/datasets/MichelinNY.csv",
                   header=T))

# using direct calculations
vY <- as.matrix(dfData[, -2])[, 5]                        # dependent variable
mX <- cbind(constant = 1, as.matrix(dfData[, -2])[, -5])  # design matrix

vBeta <- solve(t(mX)%*%mX, t(mX)%*%vY)                    # coefficient estimates
dSigmaSq <- sum((vY - mX%*%vBeta)^2)/(nrow(mX)-ncol(mX))  # estimate of sigma-squared
mVarCovar <- dSigmaSq*chol2inv(chol(t(mX)%*%mX))          # variance covariance matrix
vStdErr <- sqrt(diag(mVarCovar))                          # coeff. est. standard errors
print(cbind(vBeta, vStdErr))                              # output

which produces the output

                         vStdErr
constant   -57.6003854 9.2336793
InMichelin   1.9931416 2.6357441
Food         0.2006282 0.6682711
Decor        2.2048571 0.3929987
Service      3.0597698 0.5705031

Compare to the output from lm():

# using lm()
names(dfData)
summary(lm(Price ~ InMichelin + Food + Decor + Service, data = dfData))

which produces the output:

Call:
lm(formula = Price ~ InMichelin + Food + Decor + Service, data = dfData)

Residuals:
    Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
-20.898  -5.835  -0.755   3.457 105.785 

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept) -57.6004     9.2337  -6.238 3.84e-09 ***
InMichelin    1.9931     2.6357   0.756    0.451    
Food          0.2006     0.6683   0.300    0.764    
Decor         2.2049     0.3930   5.610 8.76e-08 ***
Service       3.0598     0.5705   5.363 2.84e-07 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 

Residual standard error: 13.55 on 159 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.6344, Adjusted R-squared: 0.6252 
F-statistic: 68.98 on 4 and 159 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16 

Answer 3

Part of Ocram's answer is wrong. Actually:

$\hat{\mathbf{\beta}} = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{y} - (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{\epsilon}.$

$E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{y}.$

And the comment of the first answer shows that more explanation of variance of coefficient is needed:

$\textrm{Var}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}-E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}))^2=\textrm{Var}(- (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{\epsilon}) =(\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \;\sigma^2 \mathbf{I} \; \mathbf{X} (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}$

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Edit

Thanks, I $\mathbf{wrongly}$ ignored the hat on that beta. The deduction above is $\mathbf{wrong}$. The correct result is:

1.$\hat{\mathbf{\beta}} = (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{y}.$ (To get this equation, set the first order derivative of $\mathbf{SSR}$ on $\mathbf{\beta}$ equal to zero, for maxmizing $\mathbf{SSR}$)

2.$E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}|\mathbf{X}) = E((\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} (\mathbf{X}\mathbf{\beta}+\mathbf{\epsilon})|\mathbf{X}) = \mathbf{\beta} + ((\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime})E(\mathbf{\epsilon}|\mathbf{X}) = \mathbf{\beta}.$

3.$\textrm{Var}(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}) = E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}-E(\hat{\mathbf{\beta}}|\mathbf{X}))^2=\textrm{Var}((\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{\epsilon}) =(\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} \mathbf{X}^{\prime} \;\sigma^2 \mathbf{I} \; \mathbf{X} (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1} = \sigma^2 (\mathbf{X}^{\prime} \mathbf{X})^{-1}$

Hopefully it helps.