Re: [R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-28 Thread Mitchell Maltenfort
You said it right in your first letter. You want to keep it at a level that is comprehensible. Not just to you, but your colleagues, reviewers, readers... Remember the sage wisdom that all models are wrong, but some of them are useful. Rather than try to forge the Excalibur of statistical

Re: [R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-28 Thread Dragonwalker
Thank you Mitchell, I will try that. So I presume that the initial paper where they showed the estimates AND the intercept from a model averaging procedure may have been done using a different method? Would it still be prudent to use a global model and then perhaps show the top so many, perhaps

[R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-27 Thread Dragonwalker
Hello all, If someone could take a little time to help me then I would be very grateful. I studied piping plovers last summer. I watched each chick within a brood for 5 minutes and recorded behaviour, habitat use and foraging rate. There were two Sites, the first with 4 broods and the second with

Re: [R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-27 Thread Bert Gunter
You've got to be kidding! You are requesting extensive statistical consulting from the R-Help list. That is not the purpose of this list, nor is it reasonable to expect remote statisticians unfamiliar with your work or state of understanding (which appears to be rather sketchy) to provide

Re: [R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-27 Thread Bert Gunter
... perhaps also worth mentioning: The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data. -- John Tukey -- Bert On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 7:55 PM, Dragonwalker dragonwalker...@hotmail.com wrote: Hello

Re: [R] Urgent - I really need some help lme4 model avg Estimates

2012-03-27 Thread Dragonwalker
I understand where you are coming from, but the issue is that some exploration of the data through graphs and the like, showed that patterns could be seen. However with only 7 means it is extremely difficult to get any kind of statistical evidence and as some mean values are the same some of the