Dear R users,

     I am having some problems with glm. The first is an error message 
"subscript out of bounds". The second is the fact that reasonable starting 
values are not accepted by the function.

     To be more specific, here is an example:

> success <- c(13,12,11,14,14,11,13,11,12)
> failure <- c(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,2,2)
> predictor <- c(0,80*5^(0:7))
> glm(cbind(success,failure) ~ predictor + 0,
+           family=binomial(link="log"),
+           control=glm.control(epsilon=1e-8,trace=TRUE,maxit=50))
Deviance = 3.348039 Iterations - 1 
Error: subscript out of bounds
In addition: Warning message:
step size truncated: out of bounds 
>

        The model with intercept yields:

> glm(cbind(success,failure) ~ predictor ,
+           family=binomial(link="log"),
+           control=glm.control(epsilon=1e-8,trace=FALSE,maxit=50))

Call:  glm(formula = cbind(success, failure) ~ predictor, family = 
binomial(link = "log"),      control = glm.control(epsilon = 1e-08, trace = 
FALSE, maxit = 50)) 

Coefficients:
(Intercept)    predictor  
 -5.830e-17   -4.000e-08  

Degrees of Freedom: 8 Total (i.e. Null);  7 Residual
Null Deviance:      12.08 
Residual Deviance: 2.889        AIC: 11.8 
There were 33 warnings (use warnings() to see them)
> warnings()
1: step size truncated: out of bounds
...
31: step size truncated: out of bounds
32: algorithm stopped at boundary value in: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = 
weights, start = start, etastart = etastart,   ...
33: fitted probabilities numerically 0 or 1 occurred in: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, 
weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart,   ...
>

        Since the intercept in the above fit is fairly small I thought I could 
use -4e-8 as a reasonable starting value in a model without intercept. But to 
no avail:

> glm(cbind(success,failure) ~ predictor + 0, start=-4e-8,
+           family=binomial(link="log"),
+           control=glm.control(epsilon=1e-8,trace=FALSE,maxit=50))
Error in glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = 
etastart,  : 
        cannot find valid starting values: please specify some
>

        I am stuck here. Am I doing something wrong when specifying the 
starting value? I would appreciate any help. (I could not find anything 
relevant in the documentation of glm and the mailing list archives, but I did 
not read the source code of glm yet.)

Roland


PS: I am using R Version 2.2.0 (R Cocoa GUI 1.13 (1915)) on MacOSX 10.4.4

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Regoes
Theoretical Biology
Universitaetsstr. 16 
ETH Zentrum, CHN H76.1 
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

tel: +41-44-632-6935
fax: +41-44-632-1271

______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html

Reply via email to