scipy linregress function erroneous standard error return?

Question

Hello,

I have a weird situation with scipy.stats.linregress seems to be returning an incorrect standard error:

>>> from scipy import stats
>>> x = [5.05, 6.75, 3.21, 2.66]
>>> y = [1.65, 26.5, -5.93, 7.96]
>>> gradient, intercept, r_value, p_value, std_err = stats.linregress(x,y)
>>> gradient
5.3935773611970186
>>> intercept
-16.281127993087829
>>> r_value
0.72443514211849758
>>> r_value**2
0.52480627513624778
>>> std_err
3.6290901222878866

Whereas Excel returns the following:

 slope: 5.394

 intercept: -16.281

 rsq: 0.525

 steyX: 11.696

steyX is excel's standard error function, returning 11.696 versus scipy's 3.63. Anybody know what's going on here? Any alternative way of getting the standard error of a regression in python, without going to Rpy?

Answer 1

I've just been informed by the SciPy user group that the std_err here represents the standard error of the gradient line, not the standard error of the predicted y's, as per Excel. Nevertheless users of this function should be careful, because this was not always the behaviour of this library - it used to output exactly as Excel, and the changeover appears to have occurred in the past few months.

Anyway still looking for an equivalent to STEYX in Python.

Answer 2

You could try the statsmodels package from scikits:

In [37]: import scikits.statsmodels as sm

In [38]: x = [5.05, 6.75, 3.21, 2.66]

In [39]: y = [1.65, 26.5, -5.93, 7.96]

In [40]: X = sm.add_constant(x) # intercept

In [41]: model = sm.OLS(y, X)

In [42]: fit = model.fit()

In [43]: fit.params
Out[43]: array([  5.39357736, -16.28112799])

In [44]: fit.rsquared
Out[44]: 0.52480627513624789

In [45]: np.sqrt(fit.mse_resid)
Out[45]: 11.696414461570097