Hi,

I have a huge dataset (2.5 million patients nested within  > 100
facilities) and would like to examine variability across facilities in
program utilization (0=n, 1=y; utilization rates are low in general), along
with patient and facility predictors of utilization.

I have 3 questions:

1. What program and/or package(s) do you recommend for running LMMs with
big data (even if they are not R packages)?

2. Are there any clever work arounds (e.g., random sampling of subset of
data, etc) that would allow me to use only R packages to run this dataset
(assuming I need to use another program due to the size of the dataset)?

3. What type of LMM is recommended with a binary DV similar to the one I am
wanting to examine? I know of two potential options (family=binomial option
in lmer and the glmmPQL in the MASS package) but am not sure which is more
appropriate or what other R packages and functions are available for this
purpose?

Thank you,

AC

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