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Question about continuous distributions in GLMM

2 messages · Victoria Ortiz, Rune Haubo

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Hi,
I'm so sorry for the delay in the response, I was with a lot of work.

With "variance components" I mean the partition of the total variance into
the different factors that explain it. Our interest is to have a
quantification of the portion of the variance explained by the different
factors, both random and fixed. Translated to the biology of our data, this
means to estimate genetic, genotype x environment variation, and
environment variation of the total phenotypic variation for a given trait
in a population. In particular, the objective is to compare this estimators
between diferent populations analyzed separately.

Additionaly, reading another topics of this mail list, I found that the
classical model for testing the interaction and obtain the variance
components would be a model like the following:

m2 <- lmer ( variable ~ fixed factor  1 * fixed factor 2 + (1 | random
factor) + (1 | fixed factor 1:random factor2) + (1 | fixed factor 2:random
factor) + (1| fixed factor 1:fixed factor 2:random factor))

So, with this model, in the summary I can see the partition of the total
variance of the random effects. Is this right?

Finally, if I want the p-values of the random effects, I should analize the
full and reduce models sequentially. Also, I found that another way to do
it is with the 'ranova' function from the lmerTest package, but the results
are very dissimilar. I don't know in wich analysis should I trust, I think
that in this case the sequentially one is correct.

Thank you for your time!
Victoria.

2018-04-27 17:08 GMT-03:00 Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com>:

  
  
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On 9 May 2018 at 20:16, Victoria Ortiz <vicrotas at gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, this model will decompose the variance of the response into
variance components for the random effects and the residual variance.
Can you quantify how these approaches are different? If you run
lmerTest::ranova(m2) it should provide (REML) likelihood ratio tests
of the random terms by deleting these from the full model one-by-one.
Note that if the model is fitted with REML (default) the tests are
REML-likelihood ratio tests - otherwise ML likelihood ratio tests.

Perhaps you use anova(m2, reduce_m2) or equivalently anova(m2,
reduce_m2, refit=TRUE) which produce ML likelihood ratio tests while
fitting your model with REML and that is the source of the difference?
[For tests of random effect terms I recommend the REML likelihood
ratio tests produced by lmerTest::ranova over the ML LR tests produced
by anova(m2, reduce_m2, refit=TRUE) but other tools, e.g. package
RLRsim may produce even more accurate tests].

Cheers
Rune