Update: Easiest way to install lme4 on Mac OS X

As to point one:
* I've only observed it with slightly-pathological cases and not with real
experimental data (there will of course be real experimental data where the
bug is exposed)
I have observed it for experimental data (non pathological, I hope).
The effect was one decimal point in the t-value (1.9 vs. 2.0). (Not
that I do care too much about 0.1-differences in t-values, but I know
that some do.). Anyway, 32-bit R for MacOS X should be "out", in my
opinion. Could one change the default installation to 64-bit?

Reinhold Kliegl.
Hi,

I've had several off-list emails inquiring about installing lme4 on Mac OS X
and the progress in determining the cause of the non-deterministic
behaviour. Hence, a quick update:

Easiest way of installing lme4:

The package is available from R-forge as package checks are not run for Mac
OS X on R-forge (hence the non-deterministic behaviour under Mac isn't
flagged). However, I would only run lme4 under R 64 bit on Mac (where no
issues have been observed).

Download and install gfortran from
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/tools/ (available as a dmg which
installs the required libraries for the builds from R-forge into
/usr/local/)

In R run: install.packages(c("Matrix","lme4"),
repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org")

Summary of clues to what may be the cause of non-deterministic results of
identical calls:

* I've only observed it with slightly-pathological cases and not with real
experimental data (there will of course be real experimental data where the
bug is exposed).
* Has only been observed in 32 bit R and not 64 bit R.
* Occurs with both vecLib and R BLAS on 10.5.8 but only with vecLib BLAS on
10.6.4.
* Occurs with all versions of lme4/Matrix in the past two years when run on
R 2.11.1.
* lme4a has a slightly different behaviour in that, instead of only two
potential results, every run has a different result.

When I have some more time I'll dig deeper into debugging each run to try to
figure out exactly where the non-deterministic behaviour is creeping in. I
want to get this resolved so that the package appears on CRAN again.

Cheers,
Daniel

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Update: Easiest way to install lme4 on Mac OS X

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