[R-sig-ME] question about an unbalanced design using lmer

[Xiyue Liao]

Hi,

I'm using lmer in the R package lme4 to do a one-way anova analysis with a
fixed effect term and a random effect term. So the fixed effect is about
four medical conditions and the random effect is about randomly sampled
donors. Now for some combinations of donors and medical conditions, there
are more than one measurement, which makes the whole design unbalanced. I
think that lmer can handle such a case, and I have run the code without any
error message. However, I don't understand how this routine put weight on
the cells with more measurements than other cells. Could you give me some
hint?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Xiyue

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