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Binary response ordering

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:54 AM, John Haart <another83 at me.com> wrote:
Apparently you altered the output at some point because the factors
that were named A and B ended up as order and family in the random
effects description.
In this case it would be related to the probability of a TRUE response
but, as this is simply 1 - P(FALSE) then the only change if you
reversed the order would be to change the signs of the coefficients.
The simple way to verify this is to fit

glm(threatornot ~ 1)

and check the value of the coefficient.  It should be
log(pHat/(1-pHat)) where pHat is the proportion of TRUE responses.
If there are two levels in the response then the model is fit
according to the probability of the second versus the first.  You can
disambiguate the process if you convert the response to a factor with
the levels specified explicitly.

The bigger issue is that you shouldn't pay too much attention to a
particular coefficient related to the levels of a factor like E
because the coefficients are defined with respect to the contrasts in
effect at the time the model was fit.  Without knowing the contrasts
being used and without prior knowledge that a particular contrast was
important, those coefficients are not important by themselves.  It is
the cumulative effect of the variability amongst the levels of the
factor that is important.