 
 Dear All,
 
 I have a question concerning an error message I got when I used the lmer routine in R. 
 I fit a multilevel logistic regression with a binary response y and two factors DZ and DEL   that are non nested and I got the error message:
  "Error in mer_finalize(ans) : q = 201 > n = 160".  See below.
y is a binary variable (131 zeroes and 29 ones), DZ and DEL are factors with 80 and 121 levels, respectively, The sample size n is 160.

   M2 <-  lmer(y ~ 1  +(1 | DZ) + (1 | DEL),family=binomial(link="logit"))
> Error in mer_finalize(ans) : q = 201 > n = 160

 
  M2 <-  glmer(y ~ 1  +(1 | DZ) + (1 | DEL),family=binomial(link="logit"))
> Error in mer_finalize(ans) : q = 201 > n = 160

  It is not clear to me what the error is all about apart from the fact that I recognize that 201 = 80+121, the sum of the levels of the two non-nested factors. Do you have any thoughts on the meaning of this error message?
 
  Regards,
 
 
 Alban



      
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


