[R] anova and contratst

[Colm G.Connolly]

Hi everybody,

I'm using the gmodels package to convert human readable contrasts  
into the format required by R and would be grateful if someone could  
confirm for me whether I've got the contrasts right in the sample  
code below.

I'm working on the assumption that the contrasts are index according  
to the way that levels reports them for a factor.
In my case levels(roi.errs$Group) reports ctrl, long, short in that  
order so I'm assuming that to compare ctrl to short the correct  
contrast is c(1, 0, -1). Am I correct?

I tried to perform 3 contrasts with my data and make.contrasts  
complained about there being too many contrasts specified. Is this  
because the number of contrasts can only be less than or equal to the  
number of degrees of freedom that go into calculation of the mean  
square for the Group term?

Is the only way to get the short vs long contrast to sacrifice one of  
the other contrasts?

rm(list=ls());
library(gmodels);

Group = c("ctrl", "ctrl", "ctrl", "short", "short", "short", "long",  
"long", "long")
Subject = c("66101_2", "66112_2", "66118_2", "66119", "66121",  
"66123", "66026_3", "66030_2", "66044_3")
Mean_1 = c(-0.399281, 6.951385, 5.986774, 3.485916, 7.081511,  
1.705302, 7.859186, 4.573201, 3.931118)
Mean_2 = c(0.350127, 5.863118, 3.826101, 0.999821, 9.099477,  
2.376836, 5.384967, 5.950012, 7.688557)
roi.errs = data.frame(Group, Subject, Mean_1, Mean_2)

# planned contrasts
cmat = rbind(
   "ctrl vs. short" = c(1,  0, -1),
   "ctrl vs. long"  = c(1, -1,  0));
groupContrasts=make.contrasts(cmat);
summarySplit=list(Group=list("ctrl vs. short" = 1, "ctrl vs. long"=2));

roi.err.aov<-aov(Mean_1 ~ Group, contrasts=list 
("Group"=groupContrasts), data=roi.errs);
print(summary(roi.err.aov, split=summarySplit))
with(roi.errs, print(pairwise.t.test(Mean_1, Group)))

Thanks in advance,

--
Dr Colm G. Connolly
School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience
The Lloyd Building
University of Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin 2, Éire
Tel: +353-1-896-8475
Fax: +353-1-671-3183