Robust standard errors with parglm and the sandwich package and regression tables with gtsummary • parglm

Since parglm() returns a standard glm object, it works directly with the sandwich package for heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) and cluster-robust standard errors. The lmtest package provides coeftest() for displaying results with alternative covariance matrices.

Setup

library(parglm)
library(sandwich)
library(lmtest)

We simulate a Poisson dataset with 20 clusters of 10 observations each, where a cluster-level random effect induces within-cluster correlation.

set.seed(1)
n          <- 200
cluster_id <- rep(1:20, each = 10)
x1         <- rnorm(n)
x2         <- rnorm(n)
u          <- rep(rnorm(20, sd = 0.5), each = 10)  # cluster random effect
y          <- rpois(n, exp(0.5 + 0.3 * x1 - 0.2 * x2 + u))
dat        <- data.frame(y = y, x1 = x1, x2 = x2, cluster = cluster_id)

Fitting the model

fit <- parglm(y ~ x1 + x2, data = dat, family = poisson(),
              control = parglm.control(nthreads = 1L))

Standard errors

The default model-based standard errors assume the Poisson variance equals the mean. They will be too small here because the cluster random effects induce overdispersion.

coeftest(fit)
#> 
#> z test of coefficients:
#> 
#>             Estimate Std. Error z value  Pr(>|z|)    
#> (Intercept)  0.68030    0.05198 13.0877 < 2.2e-16 ***
#> x1           0.30156    0.05228  5.7681 8.015e-09 ***
#> x2          -0.23389    0.04742 -4.9322 8.129e-07 ***
#> ---
#> Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) standard errors

vcovHC() computes sandwich standard errors that are robust to misspecification of the variance function. HC3 (the default) is recommended for small to moderate samples.

coeftest(fit, vcov = vcovHC)
#> 
#> z test of coefficients:
#> 
#>              Estimate Std. Error z value  Pr(>|z|)    
#> (Intercept)  0.680296   0.069394  9.8034 < 2.2e-16 ***
#> x1           0.301561   0.078775  3.8281 0.0001291 ***
#> x2          -0.233887   0.058692 -3.9850 6.749e-05 ***
#> ---
#> Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

Cluster-robust standard errors

vcovCL() accounts for within-cluster correlation, which is the appropriate correction here.

coeftest(fit, vcov = vcovCL, cluster = ~cluster)
#> 
#> z test of coefficients:
#> 
#>              Estimate Std. Error z value  Pr(>|z|)    
#> (Intercept)  0.680296   0.130871  5.1982 2.012e-07 ***
#> x1           0.301561   0.045306  6.6561 2.813e-11 ***
#> x2          -0.233887   0.059090 -3.9581 7.554e-05 ***
#> ---
#> Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1

As expected, the cluster-robust standard errors are larger than the model-based ones, reflecting the extra variability due to the cluster random effects.

Covariance matrices directly

The covariance matrices themselves are also available:

vcovHC(fit, type = "HC3")
#>               (Intercept)            x1           x2
#> (Intercept)  0.0048154924 -1.496148e-03 1.564757e-04
#> x1          -0.0014961477  6.205443e-03 9.089414e-05
#> x2           0.0001564757  9.089414e-05 3.444771e-03
vcovCL(fit, cluster = ~cluster)
#>               (Intercept)            x1            x2
#> (Intercept)  0.0171271937  0.0006650872 -0.0006143826
#> x1           0.0006650872  0.0020526462 -0.0002594062
#> x2          -0.0006143826 -0.0002594062  0.0034916456

Note

model = TRUE (the default in parglm) must be set so that the model frame is stored, allowing sandwich to reconstruct the design matrix internally.

Regression tables with gtsummary

The gtsummary package produces publication-ready regression tables from model objects. parglm() models are supported directly because they inherit from glm.

library(gtsummary)

Logistic regression

We fit a logistic regression model with parglm() and pass it to tbl_regression(). Setting exponentiate = TRUE displays odds ratios with their confidence intervals.

set.seed(2)
n2    <- 300
x1_b  <- rnorm(n2)
x2_b  <- rnorm(n2)
y_bin <- rbinom(n2, 1, plogis(0.4 + 0.6 * x1_b - 0.4 * x2_b))
dat_b <- data.frame(y = y_bin, x1 = x1_b, x2 = x2_b)

fit_logistic <- parglm(y ~ x1 + x2, data = dat_b, family = binomial(),
                       control = parglm.control(nthreads = 1L))

suppressWarnings(
  tbl_regression(fit_logistic, exponentiate = TRUE)
)

Characteristic	OR	95% CI	p-value
x1	1.50	1.20, 1.90	<0.001
x2	0.73	0.57, 0.93	0.012
Abbreviations: CI = Confidence Interval, OR = Odds Ratio

Robust standard errors in a gtsummary table

tidy_parglm_robust() is a drop-in tidy_fun for tbl_regression() that replaces the default model-based standard errors with sandwich estimates. Here we use cluster-robust standard errors for the Poisson model fitted earlier.

tbl_regression(fit, tidy_fun = tidy_parglm_robust)

Characteristic	log(IRR)	95% CI	p-value
x1	0.30	0.15, 0.46	<0.001
x2	-0.23	-0.35, -0.12	<0.001
Abbreviations: CI = Confidence Interval, IRR = Incidence Rate Ratio