Thanks Ben for your speedy response, and for confirming that my problem is new.

My sessionInfo is:
R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] lme4_1.0-4      Matrix_1.0-14   lattice_0.20-23

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] grid_3.0.2    MASS_7.3-29   minqa_1.2.1   nlme_3.1-111  splines_3.0.2

The offending code is


mod <- glmer(mat ~ log(DecAge) + Sex * Ethnicity + (1 | BHID), family=binomial, nAGQ=0, data=df)

and adding verbose=100 produces no extra output beyond the error message.

The dataset has 5048 records and 607 subjects. I've experimented with subsets of the data and it is rather complicated - I'll send you the data and code separately. The error message is simple to generate with a trivial dataset, restricted to subjects with 2 to 4 records and both 0 and 1 values for mat. But there is also a problem with subjects that have 10 records, though not 9 or 11 – very odd.

mat is a binary mature bone measure, which for each subject consists of zero or more 0s followed by zero or more 1s, the 0/1 transition providing useful information about the age of maturity.

     BHID  Sex Ethnicity    DecAge mat
2     102 Girl     White  9.273973   0
4251  102 Girl     White 15.520000   1
55    169 Girl     White  9.805381   0
1876  169 Girl     White 12.876781   0
3090  169 Girl     White 14.846575   1
3697  169 Girl     White 14.846575   1
676   184 Girl     White 10.425736   0
6139  184 Girl     White 19.452430   1
1896  192  Boy     White 12.493616   0
6145  192  Boy     White 19.430527   1
1307  356  Boy     Black 11.246575   0
1914  356  Boy     Black 12.307274   0
6163  356  Boy     Black 19.255305   1
3156  386  Boy     Black 14.890000   0
3763  386  Boy     Black 14.890000   0
4977  386  Boy     Black 17.130000   0
6191  386  Boy     Black 19.364819   1
156   421 Girl     Black  9.235616   0
6226  421 Girl     Black 19.526352   1
264   531 Girl     Black  9.799984   0
1478  531 Girl     Black 11.796624   0
2692  531 Girl     Black 13.763384   0
5120  531 Girl     Black 16.752000   1
1103  778 Girl     White 10.732375   0
1710  778 Girl     White 11.747646   0
6566  778 Girl     White 19.433265   1
1791  869 Girl     Black 11.968995   0
3005  869 Girl     Black 13.997055   0
4826  869 Girl     Black 16.073000   0
6040  869 Girl     Black 18.124000   1
4834  880  Boy     White 15.504000   0
5441  880  Boy     White 17.076000   1
6048  880  Boy     White 17.823000   1
6655  880  Boy     White 18.562628   1

Best wishes,
Tim
--
Tim.Cole@ucl.ac.uk<mailto:Tim.Cole@ich.ucl.ac.uk> Phone +44(0)20 7905 2666 Fax +44(0)20 7905 2381
Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics
UCL Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 1EH, UK

Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2014 08:43:21 -0500
From: Ben Bolker <bbolker@gmail.com<mailto:bbolker@gmail.com>>
To: "Cole, Tim" <tim.cole@ucl.ac.uk<mailto:tim.cole@ucl.ac.uk>>,
"r-sig-mixed-models@r-project.org<mailto:r-sig-mixed-models@r-project.org>" <r-sig-mixed-models@r-project.org<mailto:r-sig-mixed-models@r-project.org>>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-ME] c++ exception with logistic glmer
Message-ID: <52CAB2F9.50306@gmail.com<mailto:52CAB2F9.50306@gmail.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 14-01-06 04:04 AM, Cole, Tim wrote:
The dataset consists of longitudinal measures of bone score during
puberty, where 1000 indicates maturity. The aim is to estimate median
age at maturity in four groups by sex and ethnicity.
This glm code works fine, but ignores the longitudinal element. lm2
<- glm(I(RUSBoneScore == 1000) ~ log(DecAge) + Sex * Ethnicity,
family=binomial, data=na.omit(bh[, 3:6]))
This code, which adds a random subject effect, fails with the
unhelpful error message below. lm3 <- glmer(I(RUSBoneScore == 1000) ~
log(DecAge) + Sex * Ethnicity + (1 | BHID), family=binomial,
data=na.omit(bh[, 2:6]))
Error in pwrssUpdate(pp, resp, tolPwrss, GHrule(0L), compDev,
verbose) : c++ exception (unknown reason)
I've tried various alternatives but they all fail in the same way.
Thoughts please.

    Hard to say without a reproducible example. My main comment is that
this is *not* a problem I have seen anyone report before.  sessionInfo()
please?  Can you try with verbose=100? Can you make a reproducible
example that is a reasonable size and doesn't have confidentiality problems?

  Ben Bolker

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