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Using lmer in survival

Hi there

I?m trying to fit a lmer model to a data on survival (1=death, 0=alive) of artificial frog models deployed in the field. At this early point want to know if "size" has an general effect on survival

I have found difficult to understand the model goodness of fit using the model simplification. Using a randomized block design, my response variable is "surv" and my predictor is "size".

model1<-lmer(surv~size+(1|block/size),family="binomial")
summary(model1)

model2<-update(model1,~.-size)

anova(model1,model2)

But the plot of residuals against the predicted values looks quite strange, perhaps due to the huge amount of "0" in the dataset! (562 ceros vs 35 ones).

Is there any other error structure that can be implemented to deal with the huge amount of ceros?

Any suggestion welcome, thanks.
 
Eric Flores De Gracia
School of Biosciences
University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus
Penryn, Cornwall
TR10 9EZ
United Kingdom
Mobilephone: +044 07578724705
http://biosciences.exeter.ac.uk/staff/postgradresearch/ericflores/