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 4.4.0 alpha (2024-03-27 r86216)
## 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_4.2.0 pander_0.6.5 variancePartition_1.34.0
## [4] BiocParallel_1.38.0 limma_3.60.0 ggplot2_3.5.0
## [7] knitr_1.45
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] tidyselect_1.2.1 farver_2.1.1 dplyr_1.1.4 bitops_1.0-7
## [5] fastmap_1.1.1 digest_0.6.35 lifecycle_1.0.4 statmod_1.5.0
## [9] magrittr_2.0.3 compiler_4.4.0 rlang_1.1.3 sass_0.4.9
## [13] tools_4.4.0 utf8_1.2.4 yaml_2.3.8 labeling_0.4.3
## [17] plyr_1.8.9 KernSmooth_2.23-22 withr_3.0.0 purrr_1.0.2
## [21] numDeriv_2016.8-1.1 BiocGenerics_0.50.0 grid_4.4.0 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_7.3-60.2 cli_3.6.2
## [33] mvtnorm_1.2-4 rmarkdown_2.26 generics_0.1.3 reshape2_1.4.4
## [37] minqa_1.2.6 cachem_1.0.8 stringr_1.5.1 splines_4.4.0
## [41] parallel_4.4.0 matrixStats_1.2.0 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_0.2-19 stringi_1.8.3 gtable_0.3.4
## [57] EnvStats_2.8.1 lme4_1.1-35.2 lmerTest_3.1-3 munsell_0.5.0
## [61] tibble_3.2.1 remaCor_0.0.18 pillar_1.9.0 htmltools_0.5.8
## [65] gplots_3.1.3.1 R6_2.5.1 Rdpack_2.6 evaluate_0.23
## [69] lattice_0.22-6 Biobase_2.64.0 highr_0.10 rbibutils_2.2.16
## [73] backports_1.4.1 RhpcBLASctl_0.23-42 broom_1.0.5 fANCOVA_0.6-1
## [77] corpcor_1.6.10 bslib_0.6.2 Rcpp_1.0.12 nlme_3.1-164
## [81] xfun_0.43 pkgconfig_2.0.3