Following classical ANOVA, I thought it important to have replication at each level. Maybe this is not essential for mixed models? ? Here's my model: Y~1+(1|SUBJECT/OCCASION) ? Each subject was tested on multiple occasions.I want to evaluate the variance within-subjects and variance within-occasions. ? I have data for 105 subjects. Occasions per subject ranges from 1 to 4. Repeated measurements of the response Y per occasion range from 1 to 5. ? Originally, I thought to restrict the modelling to subjects tested on at least 2 occasions and with at least 2 Y data per occasion. Here are the numbers of "levels" in the reduced dataset: ?
model=lmer(Y~1+(1|SUBJECT/OCCASION), data=reduced) # subjects length(ranef(model, standard=TRUE)[[2]][, 1])
[1] 57
# occasions length(ranef(model, standard=TRUE)[[1]][, 1])
[1] 138
# Y measurements length(resid(model))
[1] 353 ? And here's what I get with the full dataset: ?
model=lmer(Y~1+(1|SUBJECT/OCCASION), data=full) length(ranef(model, standard=TRUE)[[2]][, 1])
[1] 105
length(ranef(model, standard=TRUE)[[1]][, 1])
[1] 196
length(resid(model))
[1] 471 ? There are some potential issues in the full dataset affecting 48/105 of the subjects: 1) No replication (i.e. subjects measured on 1 occasion and once). 2) No replication of occasions (i.e. subjects measured multiple times but on 1 occasion). 3) No replication of measurements on some occasions (i.e. subjects measured on multiple occasions but sometimes with only 1 measurement per occasion). ? I do not want to ignore potentially informative data and the precision for random effect results seems to improve with the full dataset. ? I welcome some guidance on how I should proceed. Perhaps some of the issues 1), 2), 3) are allowable and some are not? ? Stephen.