[R-sig-ME] Is there a final-ish format for lme4 objects now?

[Ben Bolker]

Martin Maechler <maechler at ...> writes:

> 
> >>>>> Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at ...>
> >>>>>     on Mon, 9 Apr 2012 16:48:10 -0500 writes:
> 
 
  [snip]

>     > Has lme4 output reached a point where I can treat the
>     > output from lme4 functions as "more or less" stable?  If I
>     > make the table maker function work with lme4 objects (the
>     > stable CRAN version), is that function likely to also work
>     > with the development version of lme4? 
> 
> Yes, if you do *not* access slots of the resulting object
> directly,
> but rather use methods such as
>     residuals(), fitted(), coefficients(), varCorr()
> *or* then, the 
>     getME()  function which we've been providing for  CRAN-lme4
> for a while now, to make the transition between CRAN-lme4
> (will become "lme4.0" and basically unmaintained) and  R-forge-lme4
> which will become the new CRAN-lme4
> as soon as we have removed the few remaining show-stopping
> glitches.
> 

  By the way, that's VarCorr() ... vcov() may be useful as well.
The format of the object returned by VarCorr() is a little clunky --
there may be some more convenient/pretty interfaces to it coming,
but the structure itself as described in ?VarCorr should stay
the same.

  You might take a look at my coefplot2 package (on r-forge,
not yet on CRAN) to see if you can use any of its technology
for extracting information from a range of model outputs ...


 Ben Bolker