Class Activity

Simulation: the normality assumption in linear regression

In a previous class, we started a simulation to assess how important the normality assumption is in the simple linear regression model

$$Y_i = \beta_0 + \beta_1 X_i + \varepsilon_i$$

That is, how important is the assumption that $\varepsilon_i \sim N(0, \sigma^2)$?

So far, we have written the following code to simulate data for which the normality assumption is satisfied:

nsim <- 1000
n <- 100 # sample size
beta0 <- 0.5 # intercept
beta1 <- 1 # slope
results <- rep(NA, nsim)

for(i in 1:nsim){
  x <- runif(n, min=0, max=1)
  noise <- rnorm(n, mean=0, sd=1)
  y <- beta0 + beta1*x + noise

  lm_mod <- lm(y ~ x)
  ci <- confint(lm_mod, "x", level = 0.95)
  
  results[i] <- ci[1] < 1 & ci[2] > 1
}
mean(results)

In particular, the line noise <- rnorm(n, mean=0, sd=1) ensures the errors come from a normal distribution. Running this code, the coverage of our confidence intervals is approximately 95% (as expected).

Now, we want to know how important it is that the errors $\varepsilon_i$ be normal. To address that question, we need to see what happens when $\varepsilon_i$ comes from a different distribution! We can simulate from many different distributions in R, including the following:

• $t$ distribution, using rt(...)
• exponential distribution, using rexp(...)
• $\chi^2$ distribution, using rchisq(...)
• gamma distribution, using rgamma(...)
• uniform distribution, using runif(...)