How to get the standardized beta coefficients from glm.nb regression in R?

Question

I'm working in R, using glm.nb (of the MASS package) to model count data with a negative binomial regression model. I'd like to get the standardized (beta) coefficients from the model, but am given the unstandardized (b "Estimate") coefficients.

The R documentation does not seem to show of a way to retrieve the standardized beta weights easily for a negative bionomial regression model.

The R script is something like:

library("MASS")
nb = glm.nb(responseCountVar ~ predictor1 + predictor2 + 
    predictor3 + predictor4 + predictor5 + predictor6 + 
    predictor7 + predictor8 + predictor9 + predictor10 + 
    predictor11 + predictor12 + predictor13 + predictor14 + 
    predictor15 + predictor16 + predictor17 + predictor18 + 
    predictor19 + predictor20 + predictor21,
    data=myData, control=glm.control(maxit=125))
summary(nb)

and the output of the above is:

Deviance Residuals: 
    Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
-5.1462  -1.0080  -0.4247   0.2277   3.4336  

Coefficients:
                Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
(Intercept)   -3.059e+00  3.782e-01  -8.088 6.05e-16 ***
predictor1    -2.447e+00  4.930e-01  -4.965 6.88e-07 ***
predictor2    -1.004e+00  1.313e-01  -7.650 2.00e-14 ***
predictor3     1.158e+00  1.440e-01   8.047 8.46e-16 ***
predictor4     1.334e+00  7.034e-02  18.970  < 2e-16 ***
predictor5     9.862e-01  2.006e-01   4.915 8.87e-07 ***
predictor6     1.166e+00  2.378e+00   0.490  0.62392    
predictor7    -1.057e-01  1.494e-01  -0.707  0.47936    
predictor8     4.051e-01  7.318e-02   5.536 3.10e-08 ***
predictor9    -3.320e-01  1.132e-01  -2.933  0.00336 ** 
predictor10    3.761e-01  1.561e-01   2.409  0.01600 *  
predictor11    8.660e-02  4.332e-02   1.999  0.04557 *  
predictor12   -1.583e-01  2.044e-01  -0.774  0.43872    
predictor13    6.404e-02  3.972e-03  16.122  < 2e-16 ***
predictor14    4.264e-03  2.297e-04  18.563  < 2e-16 ***
predictor15    3.279e-03  5.697e-04   5.755 8.68e-09 ***
predictor16    3.487e-03  3.447e-03   1.012  0.31177    
predictor17    1.534e-04  1.647e-04   0.931  0.35182    
predictor18   -7.606e-05  9.021e-05  -0.843  0.39917    
predictor19    2.536e-04  1.733e-05  14.633  < 2e-16 ***
predictor20    2.997e-02  4.977e-03   6.021 1.73e-09 ***
predictor21    2.756e+01  3.508e+00   7.856 3.98e-15 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 

(Dispersion parameter for Negative Binomial(0.9232) family taken to be 1)

    Null deviance: 5631.1  on 1835  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 2120.7  on 1814  degrees of freedom

                                AIC: 19268    
Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 1    
                              Theta: 0.9232 
                          Std. Err.: 0.0282 
                 2 x log-likelihood: -19221.9910

My question is: Is there a way to get the beta weights, or do I need to try to convert my unstandardized b coefficients to standardized beta coefficients (if so, how would I do that)?

Answer 1

A quick way to get at the standardized beta coefficients directly from any lm (or glm) model in R, try using lm.beta(model). In the example provided, this would be:

library("MASS")
nb = glm.nb(responseCountVar ~ predictor1 + predictor2 + 
    predictor3 + predictor4 + predictor5 + predictor6 + 
    predictor7 + predictor8 + predictor9 + predictor10 + 
    predictor11 + predictor12 + predictor13 + predictor14 + 
    predictor15 + predictor16 + predictor17 + predictor18 + 
    predictor19 + predictor20 + predictor21,
    data=myData, control=glm.control(maxit=125))
summary(nb)

library(QuantPsyc)
lm.beta(nb)