Regression evaluation in R

Question

Are there any utilities/packages for showing various performance metrics of a regression model on some labeled test data? Basic stuff I can easily write like RMSE, R-squared, etc., but maybe with some extra utilities for visualization, or reporting the distribution of prediction confidence/variance, or other things I haven't thought of. This is usually reported in most training utilities (like caret's train), but only over the training data (AFAICT). Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This question is really quite broad and should be focused a bit, but here's a small subset of functions written to work with linear models:

x <- rnorm(seq(1,100,1))
y <- rnorm(seq(1,100,1))
model <- lm(x~y)

#general summary
summary(model)
#Visualize some diagnostics
plot(model)
#Coefficient values
coef(model)
#Confidence intervals
confint(model)
#predict values
predict(model)
#predict new values
predict(model, newdata = data.frame(y = 1:10))
#Residuals
resid(model)
#Standardized residuals
rstandard(model)
#Studentized residuals
rstudent(model)
#AIC
AIC(model)
#BIC
BIC(model)
#Cook's distance
cooks.distance(model)
#DFFITS
dffits(model)
#lots of measures related to model fit
influence.measures(model)

Answer 2

Bootstrap confidence intervals for parameters of models can be computed using the recommended package boot. It is a very general package requiring you to write a simple wrapper function to return the parameter of interest, say fit the model with some supplied data and return one of the model coefficients, whilst it takes care of the rest, doing the sampling and computation of intervals etc.

Consider also the caret package, which is a wrapper around a large number of modelling functions, but also provides facilities to compare model performance using a range of metrics using an independent test set or a resampling of the training data (k-fold, bootstrap). caret is well documented and quite easy to use, though to get the best out of it, you do need to be familiar with the modelling function you want to employ.