[R-sig-ME] Error in documentation of lmer?

[Douglas Bates]

Hmm, both control = list(msVerbose = TRUE) and verbose = TRUE should
result in verbose output from the optimization, although verbose =
TRUE is the preferred form now.

It looks as if at some point I got carried away with cleaning up the
code and removed the part of lmer that handles the control argument.
I have restored that and will issue a new version of the lme4 package.

Thanks for the report.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Lyman, Mark <Mark.Lyman at atk.com> wrote:
> According to the documentation of lmer, the way to get the fitting
> algorithm steps is by setting the control = list(msVerbose=TRUE). For
> me, this seems to be ignored.
>
>> (fm1 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (Days|Subject), sleepstudy,
> control=list(msVerbose=TRUE)))
> Linear mixed model fit by REML
> Formula: Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject)
>   Data: sleepstudy
>  AIC  BIC logLik deviance REMLdev
>  1756 1775 -871.8     1752    1744
> Random effects:
>  Groups   Name        Variance Std.Dev. Corr
>  Subject  (Intercept) 612.092  24.7405
>          Days         35.072   5.9221  0.066
>  Residual             654.941  25.5918
> Number of obs: 180, groups: Subject, 18
>
> Fixed effects:
>            Estimate Std. Error t value
> (Intercept)  251.405      6.825   36.84
> Days          10.467      1.546    6.77
>
> Correlation of Fixed Effects:
>     (Intr)
> Days -0.138
>
> However, after looking at the lmer function, it appears that by setting
> verbose=TRUE, I can get the steps.
>
>> (fm1 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (Days|Subject), sleepstudy,
> verbose=TRUE))
>  0:     1768.4124: 0.516398 0.0967302  0.00000
>  1:     1761.9813: 0.571375 0.550876 0.167097
>  2:     1755.4534: 0.790274 0.455893 0.215675
>  3:     1745.0053: 0.812187 0.239613 0.105945
>  4:     1744.2582: 0.817183 0.213879 0.0692586
>  5:     1743.9764: 0.834405 0.230507 0.0310488
>  6:     1743.8121: 0.877690 0.218240 0.0280506
>  7:     1743.7121: 0.964311 0.243094 0.0246631
>  8:     1743.6293: 0.970155 0.232066 0.0135558
>  9:     1743.6284: 0.966654 0.230511 0.0163398
>  10:     1743.6283: 0.966755 0.230912 0.0156969
>  11:     1743.6283: 0.966734 0.230909 0.0156904
> Linear mixed model fit by REML
> Formula: Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject)
>   Data: sleepstudy
>  AIC  BIC logLik deviance REMLdev
>  1756 1775 -871.8     1752    1744
> Random effects:
>  Groups   Name        Variance Std.Dev. Corr
>  Subject  (Intercept) 612.092  24.7405
>          Days         35.072   5.9221  0.066
>  Residual             654.941  25.5918
> Number of obs: 180, groups: Subject, 18
>
> Fixed effects:
>            Estimate Std. Error t value
> (Intercept)  251.405      6.825   36.84
> Days          10.467      1.546    6.77
>
> Correlation of Fixed Effects:
>     (Intr)
> Days -0.138
>
> Is this a mistake in the documentation? Or have I missed something. I
> have seen this on R 2.9.1 on Windows XP and on R 2.9.0 on Linux with
> lme4 0.999375-31
>
> Mark Lyman
>
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