[R-sig-ME] Crash fitting lmer in lme4_0.999375-4

[Nick Isaac]

Dear all,

I just installed lme4_0.999375-4 and am sad to report unexpected behaviour
the first time I ran lmer.

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08)
i386-apple-darwin8.10.1

locale:
en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] lme4_0.999375-4   Matrix_0.999375-4 lattice_0.17-4

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] grid_2.6.2



The dataset is attached. A call to:

data<-read.table("ESW_080220.txt",sep="\t",header=T)
data$W<- 5-log(1+data$CV)
full1.w.mm <- lmer(ESW ~ Wingspan * Dataset * VCS + (1|Site) + (1|Species),
data=data, weights=W)



Produces a crash with the following message:

 *** caught bus error ***
address 0x0, cause 'non-existent physical address'

Traceback:
 1: .Call(mer_optimize, ans, verbose)
 2: mer_finalize(ans, verbose)
 3: lmer(ESW ~ Wingspan * Dataset * VCS + (1 | Site) + (1 | Species),
data = data, weights = W)



I repeated the exercise on another machine, running  the version on CRAN:


> sessionInfo()
R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08)
i386-apple-darwin8.10.1

locale:
en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] lme4_0.99875-9    Matrix_0.999375-4 lattice_0.17-4




The lmer fit the model with a warning:

Warning message:
In .local(x, ..., value) :
  Estimated variance for factor 'Site' is effectively zero



The warning reflects the fact that this model is rather over-specified.
However, the behaviour in the development version is rather unexpected.
Best wishes, Nick Isaac
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