Question on fitting linear mixed model
Hi all, I am new with mixed models and would like to ask your advice respect to a model I am trying to implement in lme4. Brifely, I want to test the effect of 5 plumage treatments in the aggression response of 13 birds (territorial males of the same species selected randomly from a population). All 13 males were tested against my five plumage treatments. So, I have only one observation (response) of every individual per treatment. So, I tried to run the following model: model = lmer(Aggresion ~ Treatment + (1|Individual_ID), data=data) Then, I obtained this message: Error: number of levels of each grouping factor must be < number of observations One colleague told me that this model does not work because I only have one observation/response of every individual per treatment, whereas the number of treatments are five. Moreover, my model should not be nested because individuals were tested across all five treatments, instead of being distributed or restricted to particular treatments. I would like to include in my model the Individual ID because some individuals were more aggresive than others, and more importantly I want to know if one plumage treatment elicited more aggression than others. I understand that Individual ID is a random factor. However, I don't know what kind of mixed model I am facing. I would be very glad if you could help me with this issue. My best, Jorge
Jorge Enrique Avenda?o., M.Sc. Estudiante de Doctorado Laboratorio de Biolog?a Evolutiva de Vertebrados Departamento de Ciencias Biol?gicas Universidad de los Andes, Bogot?, Colombia. Tel: +571 3394949 ext. 3755 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]