Running several linear regressions from a single dataframe in R

Question

I have a dataset of export trade data for a single country with 21 columns. The first column indicates the years (1962-2014) while the other 20 are trading partners. I am tr

Answer 1

Quite aside from the statistical justification for doing this, the programming problem is an interesting one. Here is a solution, but probably not the most elegant one. First, create a sample data set:

x = c(1962:2014)
y1 = c(rnorm(53))
y2 = c(rnorm(53))
y3 = c(rnorm(53))

mydata = data.frame(x, y1, y2, y3)
attach(mydata)  
head(mydata)
#     x         y1          y2         y3
#1 1962 -0.9884054 -1.68208217  0.5980446
#2 1963 -1.0741098  0.51309753  1.0986366
#3 1964  0.1357549 -0.23427820  0.1482258
#4 1965 -0.8846920 -0.60375400  0.7162992
#5 1966 -0.5529187  0.85573739  0.5541827
#6 1967  0.4881922 -0.09360152 -0.5379037

Next, use a for loop to do several regressions:

for(i in 2:4){
  reg = lm(x ~ mydata[,i])
  print(reg)
  }

Call:
lm(formula = x ~ mydata[, i])

Coefficients:
(Intercept)  mydata[, i]  
  1988.0088      -0.1341  


Call:
lm(formula = x ~ mydata[, i])

Coefficients:
(Intercept)  mydata[, i]  
    1987.87         2.07  


Call:
lm(formula = x ~ mydata[, i])

Coefficients:
(Intercept)  mydata[, i]  
   1987.304       -4.101