Skip to content
Prev 17259 / 20628 Next

Compound Symmetry Covariance structure

Hi Ben, Joaquin and John,

First of all, thank you very much for your responses. They are all very
helpful.

Yes, I understand now that there is an induced compound -symmetry
covariance structure in random effects model in nlme as default. I was
wondering if now, if I explicitly initialize the correlation and impose
compound symmetry in the model code (learnt from the example in Pinheiro
and Bates):

First, I estimate the intra-class correlation coefficient and the value is
0.908. Then, I estimate the standard LME model,

model <- maize ~ "covariates" + random = ~ 1|HOUSEHOLD_ID, data=farm

Then, I impose compound symmetry explicitly:

dependency<-corCompSymm(value=0.908, form=~1|HOUSEHOLD_ID)
cs<-Initialize( dependency  , data=farm)
new_model<-update(model, correlation=cs)

Is this fundamentally correct or is it double accounting for compound
symmetry since there already is default in lme function?

Thank you very much.

Regards,
Yashree
On Sun, Dec 9, 2018 at 8:24 PM Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote: