1 mgcViz basics

The mgcViz R package (Fasiolo et al, 2018) offers visual tools for Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). The visualizations provided by mgcViz differs from those implemented in mgcv, in that most of the plots are based on ggplot2’s powerful layering system. This has been implemented by wrapping several ggplot2 layers and integrating them with computations specific to GAM models. Further, mgcViz uses binning and/or sub-sampling to produce plots that can scale to large datasets (\(n \approx 10^7\)), and offers a variety of new methods for visual model checking/selection.

This document introduces the following categories of visualizations:

  1. smooth and parametric effect plots: layered plots based on ggplot2 and interactive 3d visualizations based on the rgl library;

  2. model checks: interactive QQ-plots, traditional residuals plots and layered residuals checks along one or two covariates;

  3. special plots: differences-between-smooths plots in 1 or 2D and plotting slices of multidimensional smooth effects.

1.1 Layered smooth effect plots

Here we describe effect-specific plotting methods and then we move to the plot.gamViz function, which wraps several effect plots together.

1.1.1 Effect-specific plots

Let’s start with a simple example with two smooth effects:

library(mgcViz)
n  <- 1e3
dat <- data.frame("x1" = rnorm(n), "x2" = rnorm(n), "x3" = rnorm(n))
dat$y <- with(dat, sin(x1) + 0.5*x2^2 + 0.2*x3 + pmax(x2, 0.2) * rnorm(n))
b <- gam(y ~ s(x1) + s(x2) + x3, data = dat, method = "REML")

Now we convert the fitted object to the gamViz class. Doing this allows us to use the tools offered by mgcViz and to save quite a lot of time when producing multiple plots using the same fitted GAM model.

b <- getViz(b)

We extract the first smooth component using the sm function and we plot it. The resulting o object contains, among other things, a ggplot object. This allows us to add several visual layers.

o <- plot( sm(b, 1) )
o + l_fitLine(colour = "red") + l_rug(mapping = aes(x=x, y=y), alpha = 0.8) +
    l_ciLine(mul = 5, colour = "blue", linetype = 2) + 
    l_points(shape = 19, size = 1, alpha = 0.1) + theme_classic()

We added the fitted smooth effect, rugs on the x and y axes, confidence lines at 5 standard deviations, partial residual points and we changed the plotting theme to ggplot2::theme_classic. Functions such as l_fitLine or l_rug are effect-specific layers. To see all the layers available for each effect plot we do:

listLayers(o)
## [1] "l_ciLine"  "l_ciPoly"  "l_dens2D"  "l_fitDens" "l_fitLine" "l_points" 
## [7] "l_rug"     "l_simLine"

Similar methods exist for 2D smooth effect plots, for instance if we fit:

b <- gam(y ~ s(x1, x2) + x3, data = dat, method = "REML")
b <- getViz(b)

we can do

plot(sm(b, 1)) + l_fitRaster() + l_fitContour() + l_points()