Is anyone using the lmList() function in the lme4 package?
Douglas Bates <bates at ...> writes:
When we wrote the nlme package we tried to be very careful about starting estimates and created the lmList function to allow evaluation of coefficients from within-group linear fits. It turns out that it is most useful for longitudinal data where there are enough observations on each subject to do within-subject fits; that is, for data like the sleepstudy data. Subsequent developments have made it easy enough to fit the mixed model reliably without needing a lot of preliminary work to get starting estimates. (Similarly, the groupedData class was a good idea at the time but no longer necessary.) Would anyone miss the lmList function if it was removed from future versions of lme4?
I would vote for keeping it, too. Anything that facilitates exploring the data is generally useful. I always found the didactic use of lmList to motivate the selection of variables that might be treated as random effects, in the Pinheiro & Bates book very helpful. I'm using the lme4 version in a chapter that I'm writing currently, so have a vested interest in knowing whether it will be deprecated, as well. Ken
Ken Knoblauch Inserm U846 Stem-cell and Brain Research Institute Department of Integrative Neurosciences 18 avenue du Doyen L?pine 69500 Bron France tel: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 77 fax: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 61 portable: +33 (0)6 84 10 64 10 http://www.sbri.fr/members/kenneth-knoblauch.html