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calculating area of ellipse

Dear Jeff,

I don't think that it would be sensible to claim that it *never* makes 
sense to multiply quantities measured in different units, but rather 
that this would rarely make sense for regression coefficients. James 
might have a justification for finding the area, but it is still, I 
think, reasonable to point out that doing so may be problematic.

With respect to ratios of areas: I apologize if my examples were 
cryptic. Imagine, for example, that the same regression model is fit to 
two groups and joint-confidence ellipse for two coefficients computed 
for each. The ratio of the two areas would reflect the relative 
precision of the estimates in the two groups, which is unaffected by the 
units of measurement of the coefficients. This is also the idea behind 
generalized variance inflation, where the comparison is to a "utopian" 
situation in which the parameters are uncorrelated. For details, see 
help("vif", package="car") and in particular Fox, J. and Monette, G. 
(1992) Generalized collinearity diagnostics. JASA, 87, 178?183.

Best,
  John
On 2021-05-11 10:48 a.m., Jeff Newmiller wrote:
Message-ID: <05da711f-8b93-b064-54dd-9614edfb33c4@mcmaster.ca>
In-Reply-To: <29148_1620744532_14BEl3Vk006355_A0F333A3-9581-489D-8012-B9609CFC3159@dcn.davis.ca.us>