On 5/14/07, Iasonas Lamprianou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does anyone know if the lmer function of lme4 works fine for unbalanced 
> designs? I have the examination results of 1000 pupils on three subjects, one 
> score every term. So, I have three scores for English (one for every term), 
> three scores for maths etc. However, not everybody was examined in maths, not 
> everybody was examined in English etc, but everybody was in effect examined 
> on four subjects. I also have information abouit the school. Would this model 
> hive the right results for the variance components?
>
> mod_3_f  <- lmer(SCORE ~ GENDER + (1 |ID ) + (1 | TERM) + (1 | SUBJECT)  , 
> Dataset)
>
> Linear mixed-effects model fit by REML
> Formula: SCORE ~ GENDER + (1 | ID) + (1 | TERM) + (1 | SUBJECT)
>    Data: Dataset
>     AIC    BIC  logLik MLdeviance REMLdeviance
>  247882 247926 -123936     247871       247872
> Random effects:
>  Groups   Name        Variance Std.Dev.
>  ID       (Intercept) 5.97288  2.44395
>  TERM     (Intercept) 5.10307  2.25900
>  SUBJECT  (Intercept) 0.25943  0.50934
>  Residual             4.41673  2.10160
> number of obs: 53978, groups: ID, 5695; TERM, 4; SUBJECT, 4
> Fixed effects:
>                Estimate Std. Error t value
> (Intercept)    14.30352    1.15870   12.34
> GENDER[T.Male] -1.01776    0.06885  -14.78
> Correlation of Fixed Effects:
> Warning in x$symbolic.cor : $ operator not defined for this S4 class, 
> returning NULL

What version of the lme4 package are you using?  (Use sessionInfo() to
check.)  I think the bug that causes that warning has been fixed in
the most recent version.

>             (Intr)
> GENDER[T.M] -0.023

> How do I interpert the results?

Do you really want to treat SUBJECT as a random effect?  I think it
would be more common to treat it as a fixed effect.  If I understand
you correctly there are only two levels of SUBJECT and these are
repeatable levels. If that is the case one could model SUBJECT as a
fixed effect or consider its interaction within student with the term
(SUBJECT|ID).

It would make sense to regard the pair of responses in maths and
English for each student in each term as a multivariate response but,
at present, that model cannot be fit with lmer.

I would also question whether you want the TERM to be modeled with a
random effect.

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