Could you please help me out with notation in lme4?

I am trying to implement a bivariate county-level outcome (Poisson response with county-level offset N) over incidence of 2 diseases, dis1 and dis2, using dummy binary indicators, dis1 and dis2, and fixed effects duplicated as dis1*fixed_eff_i and dis2*fixed_eff_i.

My data is nested at several levels: states, counties, and diseases (also genders?).  Could you please help me to check/define notation  that would reflect most faithfully the 3-level structure?

This is what I have now.

Out  <- glmer(formula = Outcomes ~ 1 + offset(log(N)) + (0 + dis1|State) + (0 + dis2|County) + (0 + dis1|State) + (0 + dis2|County) + dis1.Gender + dis2.Gender + (other fixed effects), naGQ = 7,verbose=FALSE,family=poisson,REML=FALSE,data=data,na.action = na.exclude, maxIter=200000, maxFn=10000000)")

Would be very grateful for any clarification/correction.

Thank you!

Andrey


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

