[R-sig-ME] 3-level binomial model

Iasonas Lamprianou lamprianou at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 15 08:34:34 CEST 2008


Hi all of you,
I have a problem. I run a model having pupils nested within schools. Each pupil took a number of different tests e.g. maths, science etc. All in all I had 7 different tests, most of the pupils took all of them. So, my model is school:pupil:tests (7 tests, the same for all pupils). The dependent variable is binomial (0/1). I got the results in lme4. This was the model:
ABERRANT/NON-ABERRANT ~ CONSTANT + PAPERFixed + SCHOOLRandom + PUPILRandom 

I computed the school-level and the pupil-level variance like that (as described for 2-level models in MlWin manual): I assumed that my dependent variable is based on a continuous unobserved variable (perfectly valid according to my theoretical model). Therefore, eijk follows a logistic distribution with variance pi2/3=3.29. So,
VPCschool=VARschool/(VARschool+3.29)=  0.17577/(0.17577+3.29)=6.4% and VPCpupil=VPCpupil  /(VPCpupil+3.29)=0.19977/(0.19977+3.29)=7.3%. The reviewers of my paper are not sure if this is the best way to do it. They may reject my paper and I worry because I have spent 3months!!!! writing it. Any ideas to support my method or to use a better one? These are the results of lme4:

AIC  BIC logLik deviance
 6372 6440  -3177     6354
 
Random effects:
 Groups Name        Variance Std.Dev.
 Pupils     (Intercept) 0.19977  0.44696 
 Schools    (Intercept) 0.17577  0.41925 
number of observations: 14829, groups: Pupils= 2230; Schools= 151
 
Fixed effects:
                     Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
(Intercept)         -3.04953    0.10565 -28.866  <0.001 ***
PAPER[Reading]       0.37060    0.13023   2.846  0.00443 ** 
PAPER[Maths A]       0.17508    0.13536   1.293  0.19585    
PAPER[Maths B]      -0.07881    0.14298  -0.551  0.58148    
PAPER[Mental Maths]  0.01880    0.14130   0.133  0.89418    
PAPER[Science A]     0.10525    0.13842   0.760  0.44703    
PAPER[Science B]    -0.18359    0.14958  -1.227  0.21970    
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 
 
Correlation of Fixed Effects:
            (Intr)  Read   MathA    MathB   MathMental  SciA
PAPER[Read] -0.715                                               
PAPER[MatA] -0.688  0.558                                        
PAPER[MatB] -0.652  0.528  0.510                                 
PAPER[MatM] -0.658  0.534  0.514      0.487                      
PAPER[SciA] -0.672  0.545  0.525      0.497      0.504           
PAPER[SciB] -0.622  0.505  0.486      0.460      0.467  0.476
 

Dr. Iasonas Lamprianou
Department of Education
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
Tel. 0044 161 275 3485
iasonas.lamprianou at manchester.ac.uk


----- Original Message ----
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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: random effects specification (Douglas Bates)
  2. Re: random effects specification (Sebastian P. Luque)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 17:32:40 -0500
From: "Douglas Bates" <bates at stat.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] random effects specification
To: "Sebastian P. Luque" <spluque at gmail.com>
Cc: r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org
Message-ID:
    <40e66e0b0804031532q12880b01mcba6173fc3e32c10 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Sebastian P. Luque <spluque at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,

>  In the past I've used lme to fit simple mixed models to longitudinal
>  data (growth), but now I'm trying to learn lmer and its different syntax
>  to fit a more complex model.  I have a structure with subjects (id,
>  random factor) exposed to 4 different treatments and a continuous
>  response variable is measured (n).  The subjects come from 2 different
>  communities, so it's a nested design very much like the Oats data in the
>  nlme package.  The interest is in the fixed effects of community and
>  treatment, and their interaction, so I thought this could be modelled in
>  lmer with this call:

>  lmer(n ~ treatment + community + (1 | id/treatment), mydata)

>  but got this error:

>  Error in lmerFactorList(formula, mf, fltype) :
>  number of levels in grouping factor(s) 'treatment:id' is too large

>  Am I using the right formula here?  Thanks.

It seems that the observations are indexed by subject and treatment so
the number of levels in the factor treatment:id equals the number of
observations.  You can't estimate a variance for such a term and also
estimate a residual variance.

I would start with

n ~ treatment * community +(1|id)



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:32:23 -0500
From: "Sebastian P. Luque" <spluque at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] random effects specification
To: r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org
Message-ID: <878wzuzf94.fsf at patagonia.sebmags.homelinux.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 17:32:40 -0500,
"Douglas Bates" <bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote:

[...]

> It seems that the observations are indexed by subject and treatment so
> the number of levels in the factor treatment:id equals the number of
> observations.  You can't estimate a variance for such a term and also
> estimate a residual variance.

> I would start with

> n ~ treatment * community +(1|id)

Yes, the observations are indexed by subject and treatment in the sense
that id levels are the same within treatments of the same community, but
are different among communities.  This is a subset of the data:

---<---------------cut here---------------start-------------->---
id  community treatment    n
1          A        1 13.93
2          A        1 14.42
3          A        1 13.56
1          A        2 14.61
2          A        2 14.74
3          A        2 15.59
1          A        3 13.95
2          A        3 15.21
3          A        3 14.51
1          A        4 13.61
2          A        4 14.99
3          A        4 15.13
4          B        1 14.79
5          B        1 13.41
6          B        1 14.71
4          B        2 14.69
5          B        2 13.46
6          B        2 14.28
4          B        3 14.30
5          B        3 13.18
6          B        3 13.58
4          B        4 14.54
5          B        4 13.25
6          B        4 14.09
---<---------------cut here---------------end---------------->---

Of course, there are many more individuals, but the levels of id differ
among communities, and are the same among treatments.  lmer did converge
rapidly with your suggested formula though:

---<---------------cut here---------------start-------------->---
Linear mixed-effects model fit by REML 
Formula: n ~ treatment * community + (1 | id) 
  Data: isotope.m.ph 
AIC BIC logLik MLdeviance REMLdeviance
450 481  -216        410          432
Random effects:
Groups  Name        Variance Std.Dev.
id      (Intercept) 0.193    0.439  
Residual            0.232    0.481  
number of obs: 240, groups: id, 61

Fixed effects:
                              Estimate Std. Error t value
(Intercept)                    14.9748    0.1170  128.0
treatment2                      0.0884    0.1222    0.7
treatment3                      -0.2829    0.1222    -2.3
treatment4                      0.3568    0.1222    2.9
communitysanikiluaq            -0.5749    0.1678    -3.4
treatment2:communitysanikiluaq  -0.2471    0.1763    -1.4
treatment3:communitysanikiluaq  -0.7479    0.1763    -4.2
treatment4:communitysanikiluaq  -0.6169    0.1763    -3.5

Correlation of Fixed Effects:
            (Intr) trtmn2 trtmn3 trtmn4 cmmnty trtm2: trtm3:
treatment2  -0.522                                          
treatment3  -0.522  0.500                                  
treatment4  -0.522  0.500  0.500                            
cmmntysnklq -0.697  0.364  0.364  0.364                    
trtmnt2:cmm  0.362 -0.693 -0.347 -0.347 -0.524              
trtmnt3:cmm  0.362 -0.347 -0.693 -0.347 -0.524  0.503      
trtmnt4:cmm  0.362 -0.347 -0.347 -0.693 -0.524  0.503  0.503
---<---------------cut here---------------end---------------->---


However, I don't understand how (1 | id) accounts for treatment being
nested within community.  Maybe it's time for me to re-read some more
examples from "Mixed-effects models in S and S-plus".  Thanks.


Cheers,

-- 
Seb



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