# Is there a way to calculate R-squared in OLS without computing the coefficients?

The background of my question is that for e.g. the White heteroskedasticity test or the Breusch-Godfrey (LM) autocorrelation test, we are generally only interested in the R-squared of the "auxiliary" regression. However, the only way of computing said R-squared that I am aware of involves deriving the coefficients etc. This can potentially consume a lot of time due to a large number of regressors and thus a large dimension of the matrix that needs to be inverted (in the case of the White test, regressing the squared residuals on the independent variables, their squares and cross-products - the number of regressors is thus a quadratic function of the number of independent variables).

Is there an "alternative way" to calculate (or perhaps approximate) R-squared?

(I know that the problem could be avoided by using different tests - e.g. Breusch-Pagan instead of White for heteroskedasticity, Durbin-Watson instead of Breusch-Godfrey. However, I am interested in this question both for the fun of it and because the mentioned alternative tests can be inferior to the ones mentioned at the beginning.)

• My question was based on the assumptions that (i) calculating R-squared required computing the coefficients and that (ii) computing the coefficients required inverting the $X'X$ matrix, which can be computationally expensive. As the great answer by @gordonsmyth explains, the former assumption was correct but the latter was not. I am leaving the question untouched because I hope that my learning journey will be useful to others who were taught the theory of econometrics but not how to best make it happen on a computer. Nov 3, 2017 at 3:32

No, given a multiple regression, there is no way to compute R-squared while avoiding the bulk of the other computations. You can certainly avoid computing the coefficients themselves, but the main work of the computation still needs to be done.

Note however that no matrix is ever inverted during a linear regression if the computation is done properly. There are many answers on this site that explain that, for example Residual Sum of squares in Weighted regression

Here is what might be the minimum possible computation to get R-square. You have to somehow orthogonalize $$y$$ for the regression covariates, and the QR decomposition is the most-used method of doing that. Let's assume we have a $$y$$ vector of 10 observations:

    > y <- rnorm(10)


and an $$X$$ matrix with 2 predictors:

    > x1 <- rnorm(10)
> x2 <- rnorm(10)


The quickest way to get R-square would be like this. First mean correct:

    > y.c <- y-mean(y)
> x1.c <- x1-mean(x1)
> x2.c <- x2-mean(x2)


Then compute a QR matrix decomposition for $$X$$ and $$y$$ together:

    > QR <- qr( cbind(x1.c, x2.c, y.c) )


Then R-squared is one minus the proportion of the sum of squares that still remains:

    > Rsquared <- 1 - QR$qr[3,3]^2 / sum(y.c^2) > Rsquared y.c 0.3266491  We can confirm that this is correct:  > fit <- lm(y ~ x1+x2) > summary(fit) Call: lm(formula = y ~ x1 + x2) Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -2.44213 -0.47947 0.08121 0.89085 1.54395 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|) (Intercept) 0.5032 0.4761 1.057 0.326 x1 0.5330 0.4118 1.294 0.237 x2 -0.6153 0.4215 -1.460 0.188 Residual standard error: 1.323 on 7 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.3266, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1343 F-statistic: 1.698 on 2 and 7 DF, p-value: 0.2505  By the way, if you don't want to bother de-meaning the x-variables, then you can compute the QR decomposition using the entire design matrix including the intercept:  > QR <- qr( cbind(1, x1, x2, y) ) > Rsquared <- 1 - QR$qr[4,4]^2 / sum(y.c^2)


This gives the same result because the QR decomposition orthogonalizes each column in succession with respect to the previous columns and de-meaning simply orthogonalizes all the columns with respect to the constant vector.

• Thanks for the great answer! One question though: Why is it necessary to de-mean the column vectors? I couldn't find any de-meaning going on in the other answers on CV that deal with solving OLS with the QR decomposition (see stats.stackexchange.com/a/160025/182174 and stats.stackexchange.com/a/154514/182174). Obviously y eventually needs to be de-meaned for the denominator in the R-squared expression, but what about X? I checked in R and it is necessary to get the correct $R^2$, but I can't fully follow why / why nobody else talks about it. Nov 3, 2017 at 3:21
• @Candamir You can either de-mean or you can include the intercept in the matrix for the QR-decomposition by qr( cbind(1, x1, x2, y) ). Either approach gives the same result. I chose to de-mean just because it reduces the QR decomposition by one column. Nov 3, 2017 at 6:57

No, because the derivation for an OLS regression is the minimization problem for the sum of squared regression residuals. Since R-squared is monotonic w.r.t. SS-reg, the optimization problem can be rewritten as the maximization of R-sqaured and the Lagrangian will yield the same first orders.