Hello all R-user
I am relative new to the R-environment and also to GLMM, so please don't be
irritated if some questions don't make sense.
I am using R 2.0.0 on Windows 2000.
I investigated the occurrence of insects (count) in different parts of
different plants (plantid) and recorded as well some characteristics of the
plant parts (e.g. thickness). It is an unbalanced design with 21 plants with
approx 25 parts each.
Preference of the insects for a certain characteristic is usually unimodal.
As far as I understood, I have to use a model with random intercepts and
slopes, because the observations within each plant are not independent.
So far so good
========(lme4)=========
glmm1<-GLMM(count~thick+I(thick^2),random=~thick+I(thick^2)
|plantid,poisson,data=Dataset,control=list(PQLmaxIt=10000))
summary(glmm1)
Generalized Linear Mixed Model
Family: poisson family with log link
Fixed: lixt ~ thick + I(thick^2)
Data: Dataset
AIC BIC logLik
-125.2406 -83.7346 72.62031
Random effects:
Groups Name Variance Std.Dev. Corr
plantid (Intercept) 0.0173455 0.131702
thick 0.0389772 0.197426 -1.000
I(thick^2) 0.0013327 0.036507 1.000 -1.000
# of obs: 469, groups: plantid, 21
Estimated scale (compare to 1) 1.402567
Fixed effects:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -4.045569 0.346950 -11.660 < 2.2e-16 ***
thick 2.378207 0.195425 12.169 < 2.2e-16 ***
I(thick^2) -0.280898 0.025458 -11.034 < 2.2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 `***' 0.001 `**' 0.01 `*' 0.05 `.' 0.1 ` ' 1
Correlation of Fixed Effects:
(Intr) thick
thick -0.968
I(thick^2) 0.900 -0.977
============================
Question 1: Is the formula suitable for my design?
Question 2: What can be the reason for the positive logLik-value?
Question 3: It is correct, that I do not have to take care about over-
dispersion.
Question 4: When I use "poly(thick,2)" instead of "thick+I(thick^2)" I get
completly different estimate-values (the latter one are the correct one). I
thought it should be the same.
============================
[...]
Fixed effects:
Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -0.69293 0.10711 -6.4694 9.837e-11 ***
poly(thick, 2)1 -47.23211 5.97336 -7.9071 2.634e-15 ***
poly(thick, 2)2 -51.21421 4.64972 -11.0145 < 2.2e-16 ***
============================
Question 5: If I use the same formula in glmmPQL, I get more or less similar
results, but different values for AIC BIC and logLik.
I read in this thread:
http://maths.newcastle.edu.au/~rking/R/help/03b/6849.html
That it should be the same value due to the same algorithm
Maybe as additional comment, I specified a "NULL-model"
|plantid,poisson,data=Dataset,method="Laplace")
Using optimizer nlm
Error: rank deficiency of ZtZ+W detected at column 11
Is that indicating multicollinearity?
Is there is a possibility to avoid this?
I got also from time to time the message
Omega[1] is not positive definite
Can I fix this somehow?
Question 7: Is there a possibility to calculate something like a pseudo-r-
square (e.g. 1-(logLik(Nullmodel)/loglike model)?)
Question 8: When I specify the whole model as fix as e.g:
glm1<-glm(count=(thick+I(thick^2))+(thick+I(thick^2))%in%
plantid,poisson,data=Dataset)
Is the model than wrong or just less powerful? I guess the latter is the case,
but I would like to be sure. If in this version is just the power decreased, it
would be very helpful for me to use for the more complex models this approach,
because errors and warnings are becoming more frequent with more factors and
covariates.
I know that there are a lot of questions (I am sorry for that), and I don't
expect that all will be commented. Most interesting for me are the questions
1,6 and 8.
Thank you very much in advance.
Jan
========================================
Jan Hattendorf
University of Berne
Zoological Institute
Baltzerstrasse 6
CH-3012 Berne
+41-31-631 4523
jan.hattendorf at zos.unibe.ch
http://www.cx.unibe.ch/zos/index.html