Interpreting the output of summary() of a glmer-object
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 09:43:48PM +0000, Ben Bolker wrote:
Hans Ekbrand <hans at ...> writes:
So, if I understand you - which I think I do - then 0.63685 is simply the standard deviation of ranef(my.fit.1)? When I try to compute that manually I get a numerically close figure, but not quite the same: sd(unlist(ranef(my.fit.1))) [1] 0.6423346 I am on the right track?
I think this has been discussed previously on the list (although I can't point you to a precise spot), but: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.lme4.devel/8580 says "Generally you will find that the variance of the values returned by ranef is less than the estimated variance because of shrinkage." Sorry I can't go into more detail right now.
No need to, but thanks for the pointer. I take that it's not *simply* the standard deviation, but it is the standard deviation :-)