lme() with known level-one variances
Dear Vito, Thank you for your response. I still have some concerns:
See the rmeta package on CRAN (the metaDSL() function would do what you are looking for).
It is not clear to me that this function does what I need. I apologize for casting my original question in terms of a meta-analysis; it is a bit of a red herring. My more general question is whether it is possible to tell lme() to treat some variance components as known, and to estimate others conditional on them.
BTW, in your code note: i)In the model estimation, the estimated coefficients beta have to be weighed by the inverse of their variance (the smaller the variance, the more accurate the estimated beta, the more important its influence on the pooled estimate)
Unless I am misinterpreting, the "weights" argument that I passed to lme() is inverted. But after further consideration I do not think that weighting is what I am seeking.
ii) As far as I know, it makes no sense to set no.group=no.observations; otherwise you could not estimate the intra-group variance.
I am not sure to what function the arguments you reference belong (they do not appear to be part of meta.DSL()). But the larger point is that I do not want to estimate the intra-group variances -- I want to treat them as known. best, J.R. Lockwood 412-683-2300 x4941 lockwood at rand.org http://www.rand.org/methodology/stat/members/lockwood/ -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help 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-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._