Figure 1: As the correlation between regressors increases, the OLS method becomes unstable. In the limit $|corr(x_{i}, x_{j})| \rightarrow 1$, the OLS objective function is no longer strictly convex and OLS solution is no longer unique.

In ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, for given $X: \mathbb{R}^{p} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{n}$ and $y \in \mathbb{R}^{n}$, we minimize over $\beta \in \mathbb{R}^{p}$, the sum of squared residuals

$\newcommand{\norm}[1]{\left\lVert#1\right\rVert} $$S(\beta) = \norm{ y - X\beta }_{2}^{2}$$$

We first illustrate the problem with using ordinary least squares (OLS) method to estimate the unknown parameters $\beta$ in the case of highly correlated regressors on a simple example in R.

Suppose we have a model $y \sim \beta_{0} + \beta_{1} x_{1} + \beta_{2} x_{2}$, more specifically, let

$$\beta_{0} = 3, \quad \beta_{1} = \beta_{2} = 1.$$

and let the sample contain 100 elements

n <- 100


We then introduce some highly correlated regressors

set.seed(42)
x1  <- rnorm(n)
x2  <- rnorm(n, mean = x1, sd = 0.01)


with correlation coefficient almost 1

cor(x1, x2)
[1] 0.999962365268769


Let’s run the OLS method 1000 times to get a sense of the effect of highly correlated regressors

x <- as.matrix(cbind(intr = 1, x1, x2))
nsim  <- 1000
betas  <- sapply(1:nsim, function(i) {
y  <- rnorm(n, mean = 3 + x1 + x2, sd = 1)
xx <- solve(t(x) %*% x)
beta.ols <- as.vector(xx %*% t(x) %*% y)
return(beta.ols)
})


The estimator for $\beta$, obtained by the OLS method, is still unbiased

round(apply(betas, 1, mean), 3)
[1] 2.996 1.006 0.993


But the variance becomes to large

round(apply(betas, 1, sd), 3)
[1]  0.101 11.110 11.103


The estimated coefficients can become too large, some can even have the wrong sign

round(betas[, 1], 3)
[1]  3.002 -7.673  9.529


The problem can be seen by drawing a contour plot of the objective function $S(\beta)$

ssr <- function(b) {
return(sum((y - x %*% b)^2))
}

xlen <- 100
ylen <- 100
xgrid <- seq(-10.1, 10.1, length.out = xlen)
ygrid <- seq(-10.1, 10.1, length.out = ylen)
zvals <- matrix(NA, ncol = xlen, nrow = ylen)
for (i in 1:xlen) {
for (j in 1:ylen) {
zvals[i, j] <- ssr(c(3, xgrid[i], ygrid[j]))
}
}

contour(x = xgrid, y = ygrid, z = zvals,
levels = c(1e3, 3e3, 6e3, 1e4))


As shown in Figure 1, as the correlation between regressors increases, matrix $X$ becomes nearly singular and OLS method becomes unstable.

In the limit

$$|corr(x_{i}, x_{j})| \rightarrow 1$$

the dimension of the column space decreases

$$\text{rank}(X) < p$$

the objective function $S(\beta)$ is no longer strictly convex, and there are infinitely many solutions of OLS.

Thinking about this in a different, more intuitive way, we would like to estimate the coefficient $\beta_{1}$ as the influence of $x_{1}$ on $y$ without the influence of $x_{2}$. Since the regressors $x_{1}$ and $x_{2}$ are highly correlated, they vary together and the coefficient $\beta_{1}$ is difficult to estimate.

The OLS method does not solve these problems, as it only minimizes the sum of squared residuals, i.e. the objective function $S(\beta)$.

### Why does this happen?

In general, we have a linear model

$$\label{eq: model} y = X \beta + \epsilon$$

and let for errors $\epsilon$ hold the assumption (Gauss–Markov)

$$\mathbb{E}[\epsilon \epsilon^{T}] = \sigma^{2} I$$

the estimator according to the OLS method is

$$\label{eq: betahat} \hat{\beta} = (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} y.$$

From \ref{eq: model} and \ref{eq: betahat} we get

$$\hat{\beta} - \beta = (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon$$

therefore, the covariance matrix for $\hat{\beta}$ is

\begin{align} \mathbb{E}[(\hat{\beta} - \beta) (\hat{\beta} - \beta)^{T}] \nonumber &= \mathbb{E}[\left((X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon\right) \left((X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon\right)^{T}] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \mathbb{E}[(X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon \epsilon^{T} X (X^{T}X)^{-1}] \nonumber \\[1em] &= (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \mathbb{E}[\epsilon \epsilon^{T}] X (X^{T}X)^{-1} \nonumber \\[1em] &= \sigma^{2} (X^{T}X)^{-1} \label{eq: variance} \end{align}

where we took into account that the matrix $(X^{T}X)$ is symmetric and assumed that it is not stochastic and is independent of $\epsilon$. The variance for the coefficient $\hat{\beta}_{k}$ is the $(k, k)$-th element of the covariance matrix.

The average distance between the estimator $\hat{\beta}$ and the actual $\beta$ is

\begin{align} \mathbb{E}[(\hat{\beta} - \beta)^{T} (\hat{\beta} - \beta)] \nonumber &= \mathbb{E}[((X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon)^{T} ((X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon)] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \mathbb{E}[\epsilon^{T} X (X^{T}X)^{-1} (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \mathbb{E}[\text{tr}(\epsilon^{T} X (X^{T}X)^{-1} (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} \epsilon)] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \mathbb{E}[\text{tr}(\epsilon \epsilon^{T} X (X^{T}X)^{-1} (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} )] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \sigma^{2} \text{tr}( X (X^{T}X)^{-1} (X^{T}X)^{-1} X^{T} )] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \sigma^{2} \text{tr}( X^{T} X (X^{T}X)^{-1} (X^{T}X)^{-1})] \nonumber \\[1em] &= \sigma^{2} \text{tr}((X^{T}X)^{-1}) \label{eq: distance} \end{align}

where we took into account that the distance is a scalar, so its expected value will be equal to its trace. We then used the fact that the trace is invariant with respect to cyclic permutations

$\text{tr}(ABCD) = \text{tr}(DABC)$

From \ref{eq: variance} and \ref{eq: distance}, we see that both the variance of the estimator and the distance of the estimator from the actual $\beta$ depend on the matrix $(X^{T}X)^{-1}$.

The reason why the variance of the estimator and the distance of the estimator from the actual $\beta$ become large, can be shown conveniently with the help of singular value decomposition. Let

$$X = U \Sigma V^{T}$$

be the singular value decomposition of $X$ where $\Sigma$ contains all the singular values

$$\sigma_{1} \geq \sigma_{2} \geq \dots \geq \sigma_{p} > 0$$

then

\begin{align} (X^{T}X)^{-1} &= (V \Sigma^{T} \Sigma V^{T})^{-1} \nonumber \\[1em] &= (V^{T})^{-1} (\Sigma^{T} \Sigma)^{-1} V^{-1} \nonumber \\[1em] &= V (\Sigma^{T} \Sigma)^{-1} V^{T} \nonumber \\[1em] &= \sum_{j = 1}^{p} \frac{1}{\sigma_{j}^{2}} v_{j} v_{j}^{T} \label{eq: svd} \end{align}

In the limit

$$| corr(x_{i}, x_{j}) | \rightarrow 1$$

matrix $X$ becomes a singular and the smallest singular value vanishes

$$\sigma_{p} \rightarrow 0$$

and, from \ref{eq: svd}, also

$$(X^{T}X)^{-1} \rightarrow \infty$$

Therefore, from \ref{eq: variance} and \ref{eq: distance}, both the variance of the OLS estimator and the distance of the OLS estimator to the actual $\beta$ go to infinity.