family with Julian dates

Ben Bolker · 2011-03-27T20:52:25Z

Douglas Bates writes: > > On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Iker Vaquero Alba wrote: > > > ?? Dear list members:> > > ?? I am fitting a model with lmer where the response > variable is the laying date of several swallow pairs, > measured as Julian dates (absolute number of days of the year > elapsed, where 1st Jan is 1). > > > ?? I was wondering wether I should use family=gaussian > or poisson when writing the model, as I am not sure > wether this Julian d

Ben Bolker

Sun, Mar 27, 2011 1:52 PM

Douglas Bates <bates at ...> writes:

suitability of each of them?

I agree that you should consider the laying date as continuous
rather than discrete.
  If the data (within 'treatment' groups), or alternatively the
residuals, are not plausibly normally distributed (e.g. skewed),
then I would consider transformations of the response
variable.  (This is definitely easier
if all of your predictor variables are categorical.)  See
boxcox() in the MASS package ...

family with Julian dates

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