In https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/view/v067i01 the lme4 authors describe in some detail the numerical methods used in lmer. You will see that one of the transformations used to profile the log-likelihood is working with the relative covariance factor. This is the Cholesky factor of the ratio of the covariance matrix of the random effects to the variance of the per-observation noise. It is assumed that that variance is greater than zero. The model that you wish to fit is not within the scope of models lme4 is designed to fit.
On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 3:40 AM Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
On 25/03/18 12:40, Rolf Turner wrote: <SNIP>
The model that I wanted to fit was (adapting Maarten Jung's notation
slightly to suit my own tastes):
(*) lmer(test ~ 0+person + (0+person | occasion),data=Dat)
<SNIP>
Berwin Turlach has just pointed out to me that I got the preceding
expression arse-backwards, as is so often my propensity. It should
be:
(*) lmer(test ~ 0+occasion + (0+occasion | person),data=Dat)
The fixed effect is *occasion* and the random effect is *person*.
Likewise
lmer(test ~ 0+person + (0+person | occasion),data=Dat,
control=lmerControl(check.nobs.vs.nRE = "ignore"))
should be
lmer(test ~ 0+occasion + (0+occasion | person),data=Dat,
control=lmerControl(check.nobs.vs.nRE = "ignore"))
Psigh! Sorry for the confusion, everybody.
<SNIP>
cheers,
Rolf Turner
P.S. Berwin also asked me to provide the data I used. I simply took
the data provided by Ben Pelzer, in a posting in the relevant thread,
just before the posting in which Maarten Jung explained how to get the
fit to run, by setting the appropriate control variable.
For the record, Ben Pelzer provided the data through a URL:
Dat <-
read.table(url("
header=TRUE)
(Actually Ben Pelzer wrote "mydata" where I have written "Dat" above. I *refuse* to use this "mydata" construction since it is *so* Micro$oft! :-) ) R. T. -- Technical Editor ANZJS Department of Statistics University of Auckland Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276 <+64%209-373%207599>
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