# Pseudo R squared formula for GLMs

I found a formula for pseudo $R^2$ in the book Extending the Linear Model with R, Julian J. Faraway (p. 59).

$$1-\frac{\text{ResidualDeviance}}{\text{NullDeviance}}$$.

Is this a common formula for pseudo $R^2$ for GLMs?

There are a large number of pseudo-$R^2$s for GLiMs. The excellent UCLA statistics help site has a comprehensive overview of them here. The one you list is called McFadden's pseudo-$R^2$. Relative to UCLA's typology, it is like $R^2$ in the sense that it indexes the improvement of the fitted model over the null model. Some statistical software, notably SPSS, if I recall correctly, print out McFadden's pseudo-$R^2$ by default with the results from some analyses like logistic regression, so I suspect it is quite common, although the Cox & Snell and Nagelkerke pseudo-$R^2$s may be even more so. However, McFadden's pseudo-$R^2$ does not have all of the properties of $R^2$ (no pseudo-$R^2$ does). If someone is interested in using a pseudo-$R^2$ to understand a model, I strongly recommend reading this excellent CV thread: Which pseudo-$R^2$ measure is the one to report for logistic regression (Cox & Snell or Nagelkerke)? (For what it's worth, $R^2$ itself is slipperier than people realize, a great demonstration of which can be seen in @whuber's answer here: Is $R^2$ useful or dangerous?)

• I wonder if all these pseudo-R2s have been designed specifically for logistic regression only? Or do they generalize also for poisson and gamma-glms? I found different R2-formula for each possible GLM in Colin Cameron, A., & Windmeijer, F. A. (1997). An R-squared measure of goodness of fit for some common nonlinear regression models. Journal of Econometrics, 77(2), 329-342.
– Jens
Nov 4, 2014 at 11:30
• @Jens, some of them certainly seem LR specific, but other use the deviance, which you could get from any GLiM. Nov 4, 2014 at 14:22
• Note that McFadden's $R^2$ is often defined in terms of the log-likelihood, which is only defined up to an additive constant, and not the deviance as in the OP's question. Without a specification of the additive constant, McFadden's $R^2$ is not well defined. The deviance is one unique choice of the additive constant, which in my mind is the most appropriate choice, if the generalisation should be comparable with $R^2$ from linear models.
– NRH
Feb 26, 2016 at 7:57
• Given that GLMs are fit using iteratively reweighted least squares, as in bwlewis.github.io/GLM, what would be the objection actually of calculating a weighted R2 on the GLM link scale, using 1/variance weights as weights (which glm gives back in the slot weights in a glm fit)? Jun 11, 2019 at 13:16
• @TomWenseleers, you may do as you like, but the basic arguments are in the "Which pseudo-$R^2$... to report..." thread I linked, especially probabilityislogic's answer. Jun 11, 2019 at 16:31

R gives null and residual deviance in the output to glm so that you can make exactly this sort of comparison (see the last two lines below).

> x = log(1:10)

> y = 1:10

> glm(y ~ x, family = poisson)

>Call:  glm(formula = y ~ x, family = poisson)

Coefficients:
(Intercept)            x
5.564e-13    1.000e+00

Degrees of Freedom: 9 Total (i.e. Null);  8 Residual
Null Deviance:      16.64
Residual Deviance: 2.887e-15    AIC: 37.97


You can also pull these values out of the object with model$null.deviance and model$deviance

• Ah, okay. I was just answering the question as written. I'd have added more, but I'm not 100% sure how the null deviance is calculated myself (it has something to do with a saturated model's log likelihood, but I don't remember enough of the details about saturation to be confident that I could give good intuitions) Jun 8, 2011 at 20:20
• I don't have it in the glm output (family possion or quasipoisson). Dec 10, 2013 at 9:03
• @Tomas see my edits. I don't know if I was mistaken 2 years ago or if the default output has changed since then. Dec 10, 2013 at 21:07
• Tomas the information is produced by summary.glm. As for whether that definition of an $R^2$ is common would require some kind of survey. I would say it's not especially rare, in that I've seen it before, but not something that is necessarily widely used. Dec 10, 2013 at 22:09
• Read the question. Do you think you answer it? The question was not "where can I get the components of the formula?". Jan 22, 2014 at 21:24

The formula you proposed have been proposed by Maddala (1983) and Magee (1990) to estimate R squared on logistic model. Therefore I don't think it's applicable to all glm model (see the book Modern Regression Methods by Thomas P. Ryan on page 266).

If you make a fake data set, you will see that it's underestimate the R squared...for gaussian glm per example.

I think for a gaussian glm you can use the basic (lm) R squared formula...

R2gauss<- function(y,model){
moy<-mean(y)
N<- length(y)
p<-length(model$coefficients)-1 SSres<- sum((y-predict(model))^2) SStot<-sum((y-moy)^2) R2<-1-(SSres/SStot) Rajust<-1-(((1-R2)*(N-1))/(N-p-1)) return(data.frame(R2,Rajust,SSres,SStot)) }  And for the logistic (or binomial family in r ) I would use the formula you proposed...  R2logit<- function(y,model){ R2<- 1-(model$deviance/model$null.deviance) return(R2) }  So far for poisson glm I have used the equation from this post. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23067475/how-do-i-obtain-pseudo-r2-measures-in-stata-when-using-glm-regression There is also a great article on pseudo R2 available on researchs gates...here is the link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222802021_Pseudo_R-squared_measures_for_Poisson_regression_models_with_over-_or_underdispersion I hope this help. • Just fit a GLM model with family=gaussian(link=identity) and check the value of 1-summary(GLM)$deviance/summary(GLM)$null.deviance and you will see that the R2 does match the R2 value of a regular OLS regression, so the above answer is correct! See also my post here - stats.stackexchange.com/questions/412580/… Jun 16, 2019 at 6:07 The R package modEvA calculates D-Squared as 1 - (mod$deviance/mod$null.deviance) as mentioned by David J. Harris set.seed(1) data <- data.frame(y=rpois(n=10, lambda=exp(1 + 0.2 * x)), x=runif(n=10, min=0, max=1.5)) mod <- glm(y~x,data,family = poisson) 1- (mod$deviance/mod\$null.deviance)
[1] 0.01133757
library(modEvA);modEvA::Dsquared(mod)
[1] 0.01133757


The D-Squared or explained Deviance of the model is introduced in (Guisan & Zimmermann 2000) https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3800(00)00354-9