ANOVA – What Does a Significant Intercept Mean in ANOVA?

anovarregressionstatistical significance

Consider a model with a continuous response variable and a categorical explanatory variable. I appreciate that in R, a summary.lm output of an anova on this data gives you rows that represent the mean value of each factor level. The significance stars represent the significance of the difference between the mean of each level and the "intercept", which represents the mean of the first level of the factor.

What I am wondering is what do significance stars on this intercept term represent? Simply that the mean of this particular factor level is different from zero?

Best Answer

The intercept is the estimate of the dependent variable when all the independent variables are 0. So, suppose you have a model such as

Income ~ Sex

Then if sex is coded as 0 for men and 1 for women, the intercept is the predicted value of income for men; if it is significant, it means that income for men is significantly different from 0.

In most cases, the significance of the intercept is not particularly interesting. Indeed, you can easily change the intercept by recoding the independent variable, but this has no effect on the meaning of the model.

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