Dear list members,

For a concept article we used package lme4 for a logistic regression. A reviewer doubts about the validity of the outcomes:
"I strongly urge you to compare the outcomes of lme4 in R with a validated statistical package (SAS, STATA, SPSS) as lme4 is known not to be the best, especially when the Laplace approximation is being used as the default is only one (!) integration point". (quoted)

How to repond to this? In http://glmm.wikidot.com/faq the Laplace estimation is said to be less accurate than Gaus-Hermite quadrature or MCMC methods but is the difference in estimates such that the results are not valid? Should we validate the results by running different packages ? Undoubtly we will find differences so what results to report?
What answer might convince the reviewer?

Thanks,
Hans

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