Greetings,

1) Is there a nice way of extracting the variance estimates from an lme fit? They don't seem to be part of the lme object.

2) In a series of simulations, I am finding that with ML fitting one of my random effect variances is sometimes being estimated as essentially zero with massive CI instead of the finite value it should have, whilst using REML I get the expected value. I guess it is a numerical/optimisation problem but don't know enough about the lme fitting algorithm to know which tollerance/scale parameter to mess about with. Any suggestions where to start? 

Thanks,

Steve.

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