Dear R community, I have two questions regarding fitting GLMM using maximum likelihood method. The first one arises from trying repeat an analysis in the Breslow and Clayton 1993 JASA paper. Model 3 of the epileptic dataset has two random effects, one subject specific, and one observation specific. Thus if we count random effects, there are more parameters than observations. When I try to run the following code, I get an error saying: "Error in mer_finalize(ans) : q = 295 > n = 236".
require (lme4) require (glmmAK) data(epilepticBC) dat = epilepticBC dat$rand=1:nrow(dat) dat$V4=dat$visit==4 formula1 = Seizure ~ Base + Trt + I(Trt*Base) + Age + V4 fit=lmer (update (formula1, .~. + (1|id) + (1|rand)), family=poisson, data=dat, nAGQ=1) Is it true that there is no way to fit such a model in an ML analysis? In other words, is there a way to approximate the likelihood of fixed effects and variance components without relying on estimates of random effects? The second question is that when it is possible to obtain MLE of a GLMM model, how can I obtain an estimated variance of the variance component estimates using lmer or other functions? Thank you very much for your help! Youyi Fong ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Youyi Fong, Graduate Student, Department of Biostatistics University of Washington, Box 357232, Seattle, WA 98195 [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.