[R-sig-ME] "varFunc" classes

[Dan Jackson]

Thanks to everyone for their help, Ben and Wolfgang in particular. I 
managed to get some results for a toy-warm up example using

fm10 <- lme(OUT ~ factor(study)+treat, data = DD, random = ~ 
treat-1|study,weights=varIdent(form = ~ 1 | study),control=list(maxIter 
= 500, msMaxIter = 500))

here DD is a dataframe containing simulated data: 10,000 rows of OUT 
("outcome", just normally distributed data) treat (0/1 with probability 
0.5 for "success") and study contains the study number from 1 to 10, 1 
for the first 1000 observations, 2 for the second 1000 and so on. For 
fun I made the first and last groups have larger variances to see if 
varIndent would pick this up -- which it clearly did which is wonderful.

I would not have gotten this far without your help Ben and Wolfgang in 
particular. My only slight residual (no pun intended?!) concern is that 
I seem to be getting some O's for DOF for the which is a bit perplexing 
(for the the factor(study) s in the model). I have done some googling 
and this DOF issue seems to be a special issue in its own right. Since I 
am happy to use normal approximations I can get my inferences but this 
is something that might be worth thinking about, DOF=0 would appear to 
be just plain wrong to me!?!

I am confident I will be able to fit this type of model to my real data 
in the new year. Thanks all, Merry Christmas, Dan

On 14/12/2016 19:02, Ben Bolker wrote:
>    I'm too lazy to see if anyone has answered this one already, so ...
>
> On 16-12-13 03:48 AM, Dan Jackson wrote:
>> Dear lme4 authors,
>>
>> I am sure you are very busy so I will just ask my question very quickly. I
>> was reading the book "Mixed-effects models in S and S-plus" by Pinheiro and
>> Bates. On the top of page 208 of this book, there is a Table 5.1 that
>> implements various "varFunc" classes. One of these classes would seem to be
>> what I need for my data: varIdent - different variances per stratum. I do
>> know that different subets in my data have very different variances you see,
>> so I would need to include this.
>>
>> However this book relates to S-plus and I am not sure if this has been
>> implemented in R, in the glmer package? My data are continuous so I would
>> just need this for lmer (and not glmer). If it has not been implemented is
>> there any "workaround"?
>    It has been implemented in R, but in the nlme package rather than the
> lme4 package (which contains lmer and glmer).
>
>     Historical note: nlme is the package associated with Pinheiro and
> Bates's 2000 book. R's first "stable beta" version (according to
> Wikipedia) was released in 2000.  Doug Bates has been involved in R
> since the beginning (or almost?).
>
>    If you need to do this in lme4::lmer, you can do it in a sort of
> clunky way by setting up dummy variables for group differences and
> adding an individual-level random effect, e.g.
>
>
> data(Orthodont,package="nlme")
>
> O2 <- transform(Orthodont,
>                  obs=seq(nrow(Orthodont))) ## observation-level variance
>
>
> ## since Female var < Male var, we have to use a dummy for Male
> ## to add extra variance for males (won't work the other way because
> ## we can't have a negative variance)
>
> m1 <-lmer(distance ~ age + (age|Subject) +
>           (0+dummy(Sex,"Male")|obs),
>       control=lmerControl(check.nobs.vs.nlev="ignore",
>                           check.nobs.vs.nRE="ignore"),
>       O2)
>
> library(nlme)
> m2 <- lme(distance~age,random=~age|Subject,
>            data=Orthodont,
>            weights=varIdent(form=~1|Sex))
> summary(m2)
>
> all.equal(c(logLik(m1)),c(logLik(m2)))
> all.equal(c(fixef(m1)),c(fixef(m2)),tolerance=1e-6)
>
>
>
>
>> Thanks in advance for any advice, Dan Jackson
>>
>>
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