Whenever you fit a general linear model (like logistic regression, Poisson regression, etc.), most statistical software will produce values for the null deviance and residual deviance of the model.
The null deviance tells us how well the response variable can be predicted by a model with only an intercept term.
The residual deviance tells us how well the response variable can be predicted by a model with p predictor variables. The lower the value, the better the model is able to predict the value of the response variable.
To determine if a model is “useful” we can compute the Chi-Square statistic as:
X2 = Null deviance – Residual deviance
with p degrees of freedom.
We can then find the p-value associated with this Chi-Square statistic. The lower the p-value, the better the model is able to fit the dataset compared to a model with just an intercept term.
The following example shows how to interpret null and residual deviance for a logistic regression model in R.
Example: Interpreting Null & Residual Deviance
For this example, we’ll use the Default dataset from the ISLR package. We can use the following code to load and view a summary of the dataset:
#load dataset data <- ISLR::Default #view summary of dataset summary(data) default student balance income No :9667 No :7056 Min. : 0.0 Min. : 772 Yes: 333 Yes:2944 1st Qu.: 481.7 1st Qu.:21340 Median : 823.6 Median :34553 Mean : 835.4 Mean :33517 3rd Qu.:1166.3 3rd Qu.:43808 Max. :2654.3 Max. :73554
This dataset contains the following information about 10,000 individuals:
- default: Indicates whether or not an individual defaulted.
- student: Indicates whether or not an individual is a student.
- balance: Average balance carried by an individual.
- income: Income of the individual.
We will use student status, bank balance, and income to build a logistic regression model that predicts the probability that a given individual defaults:
#fit logistic regression model model <- glm(default~balance+student+income, family="binomial", data=data) #view model summary summary(model) Call: glm(formula = default ~ balance + student + income, family = "binomial", data = data) Deviance Residuals: Min 1Q Median 3Q Max -2.4691 -0.1418 -0.0557 -0.0203 3.7383 Coefficients: Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|) (Intercept) -1.087e+01 4.923e-01 -22.080 < 2e-16 *** balance 5.737e-03 2.319e-04 24.738 < 2e-16 *** studentYes -6.468e-01 2.363e-01 -2.738 0.00619 ** income 3.033e-06 8.203e-06 0.370 0.71152 --- Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 (Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1) Null deviance: 2920.6 on 9999 degrees of freedom Residual deviance: 1571.5 on 9996 degrees of freedom AIC: 1579.5 Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 8
We can observe the following values in the output for the null and residual deviance:
- Null deviance: 2920.6 with df = 9999
- Residual deviance: 1571.5 with df = 9996
We can use these values to calculate the X2 statistic of the model:
- X2 = Null deviance – Residual deviance
- X2 = 2910.6 – 1579.0
- X2 = 1331.6
There are p = 3 predictor variables degrees of freedom.
We can use the Chi-Square to P-Value Calculator to find that a X2 value of 1331.6 with 3 degrees of freedom has a p-value of 0.000000.
Since this p-value is much less than .05, we would conclude that the model is highly useful for predicting the probability that a given individual defaults.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform logistic regression in practice in both R and Python:
How to Perform Logistic Regression in R
How to Perform Logistic Regression in Python