Dear all,
We want to test if the invasiveStatus is predicted by the amount
(quant) of animals arriving to a country of a certain species
(taxonid). We are using lmer to perform the model.
The model is:lmer(invasiveStatus~I(log(quant+1))+I(log(inDegree+1))+(1|taxonid)+(1|country),
family=binomial,data=td),
where invasiveStatus is a binary variable, quant and inDegree are
integer variables, and taxonid and country are factor variables.
The fixef output is         (Intercept)    I(log(quant + 1))
I(log(inDegree + 1))          -15.6338288            0.3198074
   2.1566502
and the ranef output is, sorted from higher to lower, and showing only
the first 10 lines,
$taxonidT16	9.51T258	8.36T388	8.24T961	7.98T76	7.48T470	7.46T108	7.17T84	7.15T292	6.91T189	6.65...$countryUS	3.23JP	2.45ES	2.35IT	2.14BM	1.63IL	1.41SI	1.39LB	1.06FR	1.05VE	0.996...
Our problem is that the coefficients to the final estimate of
invasiveStatus are higher for the random variables than the fixed
ones. We think this is a result of the confound effect between quant,
and country and taxonid. In other words, the higher the number of
animals of a given species(taxonid) arriving to given country, the
higher the probability of other species to arrive to the same
country.Are we formulating the model correctly? Is there a way to
avoid that the contribution of the random variables is the most
contributing part to the final estimate?
Thanks,
Rui

<http://www.iict.pt>

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