Hello, I'm having trouble correctly specifying the random effects for a nlme model. The general summary of what I'm trying to do is that I've got a data set that has multiple individuals and multiple machines that took measurements from those individuals. At least one of the machines has drift during the day causing a visually linear decrease in the readout during the day, so I have labeled that machine as broken in the data frame.
Assuming that my data frame has the following: > names(data) [1] "AN" "period" "day" [4] "time" "machine" "readout" [7] "gender" "age" "weight" [10] "height" "time.hr" Where AN is the subject identifier, machine is the machine identifier, (gender, age, weight, and height) are the demographic data, and time.hr is the time since the machine was turned on that day. I have two functions defined that take define the machine effect and the demographic effects (with appropriate return values): e.demog <- function(e0, age, weight, height, gender, m.age, m.weight, m.height, m.gender) e.broken.machine <- function(e0.machine, slope.machine, time, day, machine) Now, I want e0.machine to be the calibration value of any machine and slope.machine to be the slope over time of the broken machine, and random effects should be defined by machine. I also want to have a random effect on the m.age and e0 to be defined by individual (AN). As I understand the nlme documentation, I should write something like mod <- nlme(readout~e.demog(e0, age, weight, height, gender, m.age, m.weight, m.height, m.gender) + e.machine(e0.machine, slope.machine, time.hr, day, machine), fixed=e0+m.age+m.weight+m.height+m.gender+slope.machine~1, random=list(e0.machine~1|factor(machine), e0+m.age~1|factor(AN)), start=c(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)) (FYI, this was typed into here, so there may be a typo, but the main part is to look at the random= part of the call to nlme.) This gives me an error of Error in parse(text = paste("~", paste(nVal, collapse = "/"))) : unexpected end of input in "~ " Can you give a suggestion of how to include the random effects correctly so that e0.machine is given its random effect based on machine and e0 and m.age are given random effects based on AN? Thanks, Bill Denney Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics Merck & Co, Inc. Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachme...{{dropped:12}} ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.