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incorporate pedigree into lmer

Sorry that I haven't been part of this conversation until now.  We had
a weather-related telephone failure in our city that knocked out voice
and Internet communications to our home for a few days.  I have only
been able to respond to email from the office and what with meetings,
classes, etc. I have fallen behind.

The questions that Jon is asking relate to the particular form of
random effects models that animal scientists use taking into account
the pedigree of the animals.  These are an example of a model with
"carry-over" in the random effects.  The random effect for an animal
enters into the model for that animal's responses and for all of that
animal's progeny's responses.

The current form of lmer does not allow for such carry-over.  The
models that can be fit are restricted to what might be called
contemporaneous random effects.  In particular, only one level of a
grouping factor can be involved in the model for a given response.

That's the bad news.  The good news is that there is nothing in the
computational methods that precludes carry-over in the model.  It is
"simply" a matter of modifying the model matrix for the random effects
before creating the mer objects.  The pedigree class was defined
exactly for this purpose.  If you look at

example("pedigree-class")

you will see that there are methods for creating the matrices to be
used for the transformation but that work is not complete.
On 2/6/07, Doran, Harold <HDoran at air.org> wrote: