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intraclass correlation (ICC) for random intercept and

Hi Jake

Thanks very much for your helpful response. I like your advice regarding not to present some of these ICCs- I must admit framing the language around them was getting a little confusing. The Goldstein reference provides the formula I was after (just after model 2 in refer for others). Whilst a mouthful, for interests sake I'll give it a go on a simple random slopes model. Finally, I got those ICC formulas for a crossed random effect model from a couple of papers I've recently read. I'd just like to confirm that for a crossed random effect model:
M3<-y~x+(1|ID)+(1|year)

ICC(ID) does not equal 
(1) var(ID)/(var(ID)+var(residual), 
but rather 
(2) var(ID)/(var(ID)+var(year)+var(residual)


Cheers John

Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:41:56 -0600
From: Jake Westfall <jake987722 at hotmail.com>
To: "r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org"
	<r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] intraclass correlation (ICC) for random
	intercept and slope model

Hi John,

Various intra-class correlation coefficients can certainly be computed for models with random slopes (which may or may not also have a crossed random structure), and they are kind of interesting to think about, but they do not end up being very useful as simple summaries of the data in these cases, partly because they cannot be understood simply as proportions of variance, and partly because, like you said, they are different for different values of the predictors. There are generally no clear guides about which values of the predictors are the ones you want to compute the ICC at.

Goldstein et al. (2002), in one of the earlier sections of the paper, discuss an ICC for a normal model with one random intercept and one random slope, possibly correlated:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/research/pvmm.pdf

I think the ICCs that you wrote for the crossed random effects models without random slopes are not quite right. Both denominators should be the same and should contain all 3 variance components (ID, year, and residual). They differ only in the numerators.

ICCs for a crossed random intercept model with random slopes look like basically the one given above by Goldstein, except there is even more stuff in the denominator, reflecting variance due to both random grouping factors. And of course you have separate ICCs for the two grouping factors.

And there are even other, more exotic ICCs that we could talk about. What about, in the crossed models with IDs and years, the ICC for ID-by-year? This would be the expected correlation between different observations from the same ID and the same year. There are many different potential levels of replication in these higher models, and hence many ICCs that we could talk about.


As for how to report these... maybe don't? Like I said, they don't end up being very useful as simple summaries in these cases. Depending on what you're trying to convey, it might be more useful just to talk about the standard deviations of the random effects.

Jake