[R-sig-ME] extract specific values from lmer summary

[Ben Bolker]

On 14-05-02 03:53 PM, Laura Prugh wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> I am trying to save specific outputs from the lmer summary, and I was
> hoping you might be able to tell me the code to do this. I'm running a
> random effects model with only the intercept as a fixed effect. I want
> to extract the fixed effect intercept estimate and the variance (or
> standard deviation) of the random effect. I seem to have figured out how
> to get the fixed effect (model at fixedef) but have had no luck getting the
> random effect. I guessed a variety of things and model at ranef returned
> something, but it didn't match anything in the summary output. Here is
> the output of my model, and I would like to extract and save the st dev
> of the random effect (0.21287). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> If you generally know of a resource for figuring out the syntax to
> extract specific values from summary outputs, that would be great
> because this is a recurring problem for me! By the way, I plan to have
> as many of my students at possible attend the workshop you're offering
> at Chena HS near Fairbanks in August.
> cheers,
> Laura

   This is really more of an r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org question:
I'm forwarding the answer there.

  methods(class="merMod") is a good way to check the available accessor
methods for (g)lmer fits, as is ?getME (an lme4-specific function for
getting at lower-level components of a (g)lmer fit in a safe/stable way).


>> lmer.sheep <- lmer(y ~ (1|year),family=binomial, data = coy,
> + control=list(msVerbose=F,maxIter=1000,maxFN=3000))
>> lmer.sheep
> Generalized linear mixed model fit by the Laplace approximation
> Formula: y ~ (1 | year)
> Data: coy

> Fixed effects:
> Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
> (Intercept) -0.8083 0.2168 -3.729 0.000192 ***
> ---
> Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
>> mn <- lmer.sheep at fixef
>> mn
> (Intercept)
> -0.8083453
>> lmer.sheep at ranef
> [1] 0.09490052 0.09490052 0.03168227 -0.01783168 -0.14832171 -0.04832885

   A reproducible example would be slightly better, but here I believe
you're looking for

  fixef(lmer.sheep)[1]  ## intercept
  sqrt(unlist(VarCorr(lmer.sheep))  ## std dev of year effect

  It looks like you're still using an older version of lme4: I believe
the incantations I gave above are backward compatible, but there are a
fair number of convenience methods in the newer (>1.0) version that
might be helpful (e.g. as.data.frame(VarCorr(lmer.sheep)))

  Ben Bolker