ggplot2: How to plot an orthogonal regression line?

Question

I have tested a large sample of participants on two different tests of visual perception – now, I'd like to see to what extent performance on both tests correlates.

To visualise the correlation, I plot a scatterplot in R using ggplot() and I fit a regression line (using stat_smooth()). However, since both my x and y variable are performance measures, I need to take both of them into account when fitting my regression line – thus, I cannot use a simple linear regression (using stat_smooth(method="lm")), but rather need to fit an orthogonal regression (or Total least squares). How would I go about doing this?

I know I can specify formula in stat_smooth(), but I wouldn't know what formula to use. From what I understand, none of the preset methods (lm, glm, gam, loess, rlm) are applicable.

Answer 1

It turns out that you can extract the slope and intercept from principal components analysis on (x,y), as shown here. This is just a little simpler, runs in base R, and gives the identical result to using Deming(...) in MethComp.

# same `x and `y` as @user20650's answer
df  <- data.frame(y, x)
pca <- prcomp(~x+y, df)
slp <- with(pca, rotation[2,1] / rotation[1,1])
int <- with(pca, center[2] - slp*center[1])

ggplot(df, aes(x,y)) + 
  geom_point() + 
  stat_smooth(method=lm, color="green", se=FALSE) +
  geom_abline(slope=slp, intercept=int, color="blue")