quasi-likelihood in glm (PR#284)
I have been using quasi-likelihood to analyze some overdispersed lesion count data which requires the variance function "mu^2" (specifically, I am using glm with the family quasi(var="mu^2", link="log")). Some of the counts are zero which led to problems fitting the model in R. 1) glm was unable to find starting values 2) after I supplied initial values from the fit of a Poisson model, glm could not proceed because the deviance was infinite. Splus 5.0 had no problems fitting the model. I was able to reproduce the Splus results by editing the quasi() family generator and using the unnormalized quasi-likelihood - log(mu) - y/mu (*) in place of the normalized version log(y/mu) - (y - mu)/mu (**) Further investigation of Splus shows how it overcomes these two problems 1) A fudge factor (in this case 0.167) is added to zero observations so that they can be used as starting values. 2) The contribution to the deviance is (*) for zero observations and (**) for the rest. I suggest that R also uses this approach for quasi-likelihood models. Martyn -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._