How to manually set coefficients for variables in linear model?
In R, how can I set weights for particular variables and not observations in lm() function?
Context is as follows. I'm trying to build personal ranking system for particular products, say, for phones. I can build linear model based on price as dependent variable and other features such as screen size, memory, OS and so on as independent variables. I can then use it to predict phone real cost (as opposed to declared price), thus finding best price/goodness coefficient. This is what I have already done.
Now I want to "highlight" some features that are important for me only. For example, I may need a phone with large memory, thus I want to give it higher weight so that linear model is optimized for memory variable.
lm() function in R has weights parameter, but these are weights for observations and not variables (correct me if this is wrong). I also tried to play around with formula, but got only interpreter errors. Is there a way to incorporate weights for variables in lm()?
Of course, lm() function is not the only option. If you know how to do it with other similar solutions (e.g. glm()), this is pretty fine too.
UPD. After few comments I understood that the way I was thinking about the problem is wrong. Linear model, obtained by call to lm(), gives optimal coefficients for training examples, and there's no way (and no need) to change weights of variables, sorry for confusion I made. What I'm actually looking for is the way to change coefficients in existing linear model to manually make some parameters more important than others. Continuing previous example, let's say we've got following formula for price:
price = 300 + 30 * memory + 56 * screen_size + 12 * os_android + 9 * os_win8
This formula describes best possible linear model for dependence between price and phone parameters. However, now I want to manually change number 30 in front of memory variable to, say, 60, so it becomes:
price = 300 + 60 * memory + 56 * screen_size + 12 * os_android + 9 * os_win8
Of course, this formula doesn't reflect optimal relationship between price and phone parameters any more. Also dependent variable doesn't show actual price, just some value of goodness, taking into account that memory is twice more important for me than for average person (based on coefficients from first formula). But this value of goodness (or, more precisely, value of fraction goodness/price) is just what I need - having this I can find best (in my opinion) phone with best price.
Hope all of this makes sense. Now I have one (probably very simple) question. How can I manually set coefficients in existing linear model, obtained with lm()? That is, I'm looking for something like:
coef(model)[2] <- 60
This code doesn't work of course, but you should get the idea. Note: it is obviously possible to just double values in memory column in data frame, but I'm looking for more elegant solution, affecting model, not data.
Answer
It looks like you are doing optimization, not model fitting (though there can be optimization within model fitting). You probably want something like the optim function or look into linear or quadratic programming (linprog and quadprog packages).
If you insist on using modeling tools like lm then use the offset argument in the formula to specify your own multiplyer rather than computing one.