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Commonly observed error message in lmer

2 messages · Luciano La Sala, Daniel Ezra Johnson

#
Dear R-people,

It's me again with, maybe, one more silly question for you. As a remainder, I am running version 2.7.1 on Windows Vista. I have small dataset which consists of:

# NestID: nest indicator for each chicken. Siblings sharing the same nest have the same nest indicator.
# Chick: chick indicator consisting of a unique ID for each single chick.
# Year: 1, 2.
# ClutchSize: 1-, 2- , 3-eggs.
# HO: hatching order within each clutch (1, 2, 3?[first, second and third-hatched chick]).
# SibComp: sibling competence: present/ absent (0, 1)
# Death10: death at ten days post-hatch (0, 1)

In order to account for lack of independence at the nest level (many chicks are nested in nest), I'd like to run a GLMM with random slopes and intercepts for nests.

Using lmer, whenever I try to model two-way interaction like specified below: 
 
model1 <- lmer(Death10~HO*ClutchSize+(1|NestID),family=binomial,1)


.... the following error message pops up:  

In mer_finalize(ans, verbose) : gr cannot be computed at initial par (65)

1. What does this error mean? 
 
I look forward to hearing from you soon! 

Best, Luciano



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#
This error came up earlier in the year and Doug Bates wrote:

            
Your fixed effects don't seem too complicated but there is a certain
inherent non-independence between ClutchSize and HO (hatching order).
For example if ClutchSize is 1 then HO must be 1. I wonder if that's
what's causing the problem?

Maybe you could try fitting separate models for each ClutchSize and
observe the HO effect separately (when ClutchSize > 1)?

You could also add a random slope as you said you wanted, that would
be done with a term (HO|NestID).

Hope this helps,
Dan

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Luciano La Sala
<lucianolasala at yahoo.com.ar> wrote: