In general, I recommend against interpreting the fraction of variance explained by residuals. This fraction is driven by:
If you have additional variables that explain variation in measured gene expression, you should include them in order to avoid confounding with your variable of interest. But a particular residual fraction is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and is not a good metric of determining whether more variables should be included.
See GitHub page for up-to-date responses to users’ questions.
## R version 4.4.1 RC (2024-06-06 r86719)
## Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20
## Running under: macOS Ventura 13.6.5
##
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.4-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib
## LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.4-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib; LAPACK version 3.12.0
##
## locale:
## [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
##
## time zone: America/New_York
## tzcode source: internal
##
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
##
## other attached packages:
## [1] edgeR_4.3.4 pander_0.6.5 variancePartition_1.35.4
## [4] BiocParallel_1.39.0 limma_3.61.2 ggplot2_3.5.1
## [7] knitr_1.47
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] tidyselect_1.2.1 farver_2.1.2 dplyr_1.1.4 bitops_1.0-7
## [5] fastmap_1.2.0 digest_0.6.35 lifecycle_1.0.4 statmod_1.5.0
## [9] magrittr_2.0.3 compiler_4.4.1 rlang_1.1.4 sass_0.4.9
## [13] tools_4.4.1 utf8_1.2.4 yaml_2.3.8 labeling_0.4.3
## [17] plyr_1.8.9 KernSmooth_2.23-24 withr_3.0.0 purrr_1.0.2
## [21] numDeriv_2016.8-1.1 BiocGenerics_0.51.0 grid_4.4.1 aod_1.3.3
## [25] fansi_1.0.6 caTools_1.18.2 colorspace_2.1-0 scales_1.3.0
## [29] gtools_3.9.5 iterators_1.0.14 MASS_7.3-61 cli_3.6.2
## [33] mvtnorm_1.2-5 rmarkdown_2.27 generics_0.1.3 reshape2_1.4.4
## [37] minqa_1.2.7 cachem_1.1.0 stringr_1.5.1 splines_4.4.1
## [41] parallel_4.4.1 matrixStats_1.3.0 vctrs_0.6.5 boot_1.3-30
## [45] Matrix_1.7-0 jsonlite_1.8.8 pbkrtest_0.5.2 locfit_1.5-9.9
## [49] jquerylib_0.1.4 tidyr_1.3.1 snow_0.4-4 glue_1.7.0
## [53] nloptr_2.0.3 codetools_0.2-20 stringi_1.8.4 gtable_0.3.5
## [57] EnvStats_2.8.1 lme4_1.1-35.3 lmerTest_3.1-3 munsell_0.5.1
## [61] tibble_3.2.1 remaCor_0.0.18 pillar_1.9.0 htmltools_0.5.8.1
## [65] gplots_3.1.3.1 R6_2.5.1 Rdpack_2.6 evaluate_0.24.0
## [69] lattice_0.22-6 Biobase_2.65.0 highr_0.11 rbibutils_2.2.16
## [73] backports_1.5.0 RhpcBLASctl_0.23-42 broom_1.0.6 fANCOVA_0.6-1
## [77] corpcor_1.6.10 bslib_0.7.0 Rcpp_1.0.12 nlme_3.1-165
## [81] xfun_0.44 pkgconfig_2.0.3