## 31.8 Interactions

An interaction occurs when the slope, or relation, between one variable and the outcome depends upon a second variable. This is also often referred to as moderation or a moderating variable. For example, consider data that look like this:

benchmarks <- get_data("benchmarks")

ggplot(benchmarks, aes(rdg_fall, rdg_spr)) +
geom_point(color = "gray70") +
geom_smooth(aes(color = ell),
method = "lm")

where ell stands for “English language learner”. The plot above shows the relation between students scores on a reading assessment administered in the fall and the spring by ell status. Notice that the slope for Non-ELL is markedly steeper than the other two groups. ell status thus moderates the relation between the fall and spring assessment scores. If we’re fitting a model within a linear regression framework, we’ll want to make sure that we model the slopes separately for each of these groups. Otherwise, we would be leaving out important structure in the data, and our model performance would suffer. Interactions are powerful and important to consider, particularly if there is strong theory (or empirical evidence) suggesting that an interaction exists. However, they are not needed in many frameworks and can be derived from the data directly (e.g., tree-based methods, where the degree of possible interaction is determined by the depth of the tree). In this section, we therefore focus on interactions within a linear regression framework.

### 31.8.1 Creating interactions “by hand”

Even with base R, modeling interactions is pretty straightforward. In the above, we would just specify something like

lm(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall*ell, data = benchmarks)

or equivalently,

lm(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall + ell + rdg_fall:ell, data = benchmarks)

However, this is doing some work under the hood for you which might go unnoticed. First, it’s dummy-coding ell, then it’s creating, in this case, two new variables that are equal to $$ELL_{Monitor} \times Rdg_{fall}$$ and $$ELL_{Non-ELL} \times Rdg_{fall}$$ (with $$ELL_{Active}$$ set as the reference group by default).

Let’s try doing this manually. First we need to dummy code ell. To make things a bit more clear, I’ll only select the variables here that we’re using in our modeling.

dummies <- benchmarks %>%
select(rdg_fall, ell, rdg_spr) %>%
mutate(ell_monitor = ifelse(ell == "Monitor", 1, 0),
ell_non = ifelse(ell == "Non-ELL", 1, 0),)
dummies
## # A tibble: 174 x 5
##    rdg_fall ell     rdg_spr ell_monitor ell_non
##       <dbl> <chr>     <dbl>       <dbl>   <dbl>
##  1      181 Active      194           0       0
##  2      166 Non-ELL     159           0       1
##  3      216 Non-ELL     198           0       1
##  4      203 Non-ELL     204           0       1
##  5      198 Active      173           0       0
##  6      188 Active      173           0       0
##  7      202 Monitor     200           1       0
##  8      182 Active      206           0       0
##  9      194 Non-ELL     191           0       1
## 10      170 Active      185           0       0
## # … with 164 more rows

Next, we’ll multiply each of these dummy variables by rdg_fall.

interactions <- dummies %>%
mutate(fall_monitor = rdg_fall * ell_monitor,
fall_non = rdg_fall * ell_non)
interactions
## # A tibble: 174 x 7
##    rdg_fall ell     rdg_spr ell_monitor ell_non fall_monitor fall_non
##       <dbl> <chr>     <dbl>       <dbl>   <dbl>        <dbl>    <dbl>
##  1      181 Active      194           0       0            0        0
##  2      166 Non-ELL     159           0       1            0      166
##  3      216 Non-ELL     198           0       1            0      216
##  4      203 Non-ELL     204           0       1            0      203
##  5      198 Active      173           0       0            0        0
##  6      188 Active      173           0       0            0        0
##  7      202 Monitor     200           1       0          202        0
##  8      182 Active      206           0       0            0        0
##  9      194 Non-ELL     191           0       1            0      194
## 10      170 Active      185           0       0            0        0
## # … with 164 more rows

As would be expected, these values are zero if they are not for the corresponding group, and are otherwise equal to rdg_fall. If we enter all these variables in our model, then our model intercept will represent the intercept for the active group, with the corresponding slope estimated by rdg_fall. The ell_monitor and ell_non terms represent the intercepts for the monitor and non-ELL groups, respectively, and each of these slopes are estimated by the corresponding interaction. Let’s try.

m_byhand <- lm(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall + ell_monitor + ell_non +
fall_monitor + fall_non,
data = interactions)
summary(m_byhand)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall + ell_monitor + ell_non + fall_monitor +
##     fall_non, data = interactions)
##
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
## -36.812  -7.307  -0.100   8.616  26.693
##
## Coefficients:
##               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept)  180.29666   32.95228   5.471  1.6e-07 ***
## rdg_fall       0.03939    0.18459   0.213   0.8313
## ell_monitor   -0.47286   53.18886  -0.009   0.9929
## ell_non      -64.12123   36.80395  -1.742   0.0833 .
## fall_monitor   0.06262    0.28669   0.218   0.8274
## fall_non       0.40801    0.20346   2.005   0.0465 *
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 12.37 on 168 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.2652, Adjusted R-squared:  0.2433
## F-statistic: 12.13 on 5 and 168 DF,  p-value: 4.874e-10

And we can verify that this does, indeed, get us the same results that we would have obtained with the shortcut syntax with base R.

summary(
lm(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall*ell, data = benchmarks)
)
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall * ell, data = benchmarks)
##
## Residuals:
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max
## -36.812  -7.307  -0.100   8.616  26.693
##
## Coefficients:
##                      Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept)         180.29666   32.95228   5.471  1.6e-07 ***
## rdg_fall              0.03939    0.18459   0.213   0.8313
## ellMonitor           -0.47286   53.18886  -0.009   0.9929
## ellNon-ELL          -64.12123   36.80395  -1.742   0.0833 .
## rdg_fall:ellMonitor   0.06262    0.28669   0.218   0.8274
## rdg_fall:ellNon-ELL   0.40801    0.20346   2.005   0.0465 *
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 12.37 on 168 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.2652, Adjusted R-squared:  0.2433
## F-statistic: 12.13 on 5 and 168 DF,  p-value: 4.874e-10

### 31.8.2 Creating interactions with {recipes}

Specifying interactions in a recipe is similar to other steps, with one small exception, which is that the use of the tilde, ~, is required. Note that, once again, order does matter, and you should always do your dummy coding before specifying interactions with categorical variables. In the example before, this would correspond to:

recipe(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall + ell, benchmarks) %>%
step_dummy(all_nominal()) %>%
step_interact(~rdg_fall:starts_with("ell")) %>%
prep() %>%
bake(new_data = NULL)
## # A tibble: 174 x 6
##    rdg_fall rdg_spr ell_Monitor ell_Non.ELL rdg_fall_x_ell_Mo… rdg_fall_x_ell_N…
##       <dbl>   <dbl>       <dbl>       <dbl>              <dbl>             <dbl>
##  1      181     194           0           0                  0                 0
##  2      166     159           0           1                  0               166
##  3      216     198           0           1                  0               216
##  4      203     204           0           1                  0               203
##  5      198     173           0           0                  0                 0
##  6      188     173           0           0                  0                 0
##  7      202     200           1           0                202                 0
##  8      182     206           0           0                  0                 0
##  9      194     191           0           1                  0               194
## 10      170     185           0           0                  0                 0
## # … with 164 more rows

There are a few things to mention here. First, the data look identical (minus the column names) to what we created by hand, so that’s good news. However, we also used starts_with() here, rather than just specifying something like step_interact(~rdg_fall:ell). This is because after dummy coding, the column names change (as you can see in the above). By specifying starts_with(), we are ensuring that we get all the interactions we need. If we forget this step, we end up with the wrong output, along with a warning.

recipe(rdg_spr ~ rdg_fall + ell, benchmarks) %>%
step_dummy(all_nominal()) %>%
step_interact(~rdg_fall:ell) %>%
prep() %>%
bake(new_data = NULL)
## Warning: Interaction specification failed for: ~rdg_fall:ell. No interactions
## will be created.
## # A tibble: 174 x 4
##    rdg_fall rdg_spr ell_Monitor ell_Non.ELL
##       <dbl>   <dbl>       <dbl>       <dbl>
##  1      181     194           0           0
##  2      166     159           0           1
##  3      216     198           0           1
##  4      203     204           0           1
##  5      198     173           0           0
##  6      188     173           0           0
##  7      202     200           1           0
##  8      182     206           0           0
##  9      194     191           0           1
## 10      170     185           0           0
## # … with 164 more rows

This warning occurs because R is trying to find a column called ell to multiply with rdg_fall, but no such variable exists after dummy coding.