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MANOVA with random factor

On May 18, 2012, at 16:15 , David Costantini wrote:

            
It might but it isn't easy. And especially in small samples it might not do it reliably.

First, is this a balanced design? I.e. for each brood, you have say two males and two females one of each allocated to each experimental group. In such models, the analysis can be partitioned in an analysis of brood averages and within-brood differences, where the latter can be obtained by adding brood as a fixed effect. In fact, you can do that if you just have the same number of observations per brood, but without balancing, you'll get information on some effects from multiple strata. All of this carries over to multivariate responses, but it isn't implemented for aov()/manova() so you'd have to do the averages yourself.

For arbitrary designs, lme() is probably the best/only route. The trick there is to pretend that the variables are repeated measures on the same unit and then specify an arbitrary within-unit covariance structure. It does get rather involved and I'm afraid I don't recall exactly how to do it --- it's something with correlation=, weights= for the finest-level effect (variable within individual within brood) and pdSymm for the coarser level (variable within brood). 

lme() is a bit old and has known issues with degrees-of-freedom calculations so works best if you have a sizable number of broods so that df are large enough not to matter.

Notice also, that this is the basic R-help group. There is also R-sig-ME which specializes in mixed effects, and it might be better to take the issue there. (In particular, some people there may have better memory than I do...)

-pd