[R] residual variance in lmer

[Douglas Bates]

On 11/4/05, Tom Van Dooren <vdooren at rulsfb.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:

> when running lmer with family set to quasibinomial,
> is the "residual" variance reported among the random effects, the
> dispersion parameter as in glm, or something else?

It should be the dispersion parameter.  I say "should be" because I am
not that familiar with the quasibinomial family and I don't know
exactly how the dispersion parameter is defined.  I can tell you that
the 'residual' variance is evaluated as the ML estimate of the
variance from the last weighted penalized least squares problem used
in the iterative estimation.  Does that help?