I have a fairly large model:

> length(Y)
[1] 3051
> dim(covariates)
[1] 3051  211

All of these 211 covariates need to be nested hierarchically within a
grouping "class", of which there are 8.  I have an accessory vector, "
cov2class" that specifies the mapping between covariates and the 8 classes.

Now, I understand I can break all this information up into individual
vectors (cov1, cov2, ..., cov211, class1, class2, ..., class8), and do
something like this:

model <- lmer(Y ~ 1 + cov1 + cov2 + ... + cov211 +
                  (cov1 + cov2 + ... | class1) +
                  (...) +
                  (... + cov210 + cov211 | class8)

But I'd like keep things syntactically simpler, and use the covariates
and cov2class
variables directly.  I haven't been able to find the right syntactic sugar
to get this done.

Thanks for any help,

-Aaron

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