Skip to content
Prev 11600 / 20628 Next

gee, geese and glmer

Thanks, Ben!

Changing optimization method does not change results for lme4 1.0-6. I will
install 1.1-4 version and get back to you.

Best,

Ming-Huei

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Bolker [mailto:bbolker at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, March 8, 2014 5:25 PM
To: r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org
Cc: Ming-Huei Chen; 'Yang, Qiong'
Subject: Re: gee, geese and glmer
On 14-03-07 11:25 PM, Ming-Huei Chen wrote:
[cc'ing to r-sig-mixed-models: **please** try r-sig-mixed-models first,
not personal e-mail to me ...]

  I can't say exactly what's going here; without having a reproducible
example <http://tinyurl.com/reproducible-000> it's hard to say precisely.
Thoughts:

 * gee and geese are giving _exactly_ the same parameter estimates, to
8 significant digits, so I would guess they are wrapping identical
underlying methods.

 * As far as diagnosing the issue with lme4 1.0-6:
   * does changing the optimization method, i.e.
 glmerControl(optimizer="optimx",optCtrl=list(method="nlminb"))
   [must do library("optimx") first] or
 glmerControl(optimizer="bobyqa")

  change the result?

 * I would be curious whether the soon-to-be-released version 1.1-4 (which
can be installed from github or lme4.r-forge.r-project.org/repos) gives
either (1) convergence warnings or (2) different/better answers

 * You can try specifying the starting values for lme4 to diagnose
misconvergence; for example, start lme4 from the estimates given by old
lme4/lme4.0 and see if it gives a similar answer.

 * You can use the 'slice' and 'splom.slice' functions from bbmle to
visualize the likelihood surfaces

  good luck,
   Ben Bolker