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Re: lme$apVar and PROC MIXED Std. Error of varcomp ests

To: Sven.Knudsen@adeptscience.dk
Subject: Re: lme$apVar and PROC MIXED Std. Error of varcomp ests
From: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@PDF.COM>
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 07:49:29 -0700
Cc: s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
References: <OF5FC43895.FE154E62-ON80256D66.004BA676-C1256D66.004C81FA@adeptscience.co.uk>
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02
Have you checked Pinhiero and Bates (2000) Mixed-Effects Models in S and S-Plus (Springer)? This is the primary documentation for "lme" and includes, I believe, the answer to this question and many others. Doug Bates is the primary developer of "lme" in conjunction with several of his graduate students including Jose Pinhiero.

Doug is also arguably the leading figure in nonlinear regression, having explained carefully the difference between intrinsic and parameter effects nonlinearity. Bates and Watts (1988) Nonlinear Regression Analysis and Its Applications (Wiley) include a table in a later chapter showing that for 30-60 published data sets they analyzed, the parameter effects were roughly 10 times the intrinsic curvature. This means that profiling produces much more accurate confidence regions than using any neg inverse Hessian, and within the latter, a smart selection of transformation like log(variances) will produce much more accurate confidence regions than without.

Sorry I couldn't just give you the fish you wanted, but the fishing equipment I mentioned may help you more in the long run.

Best Wishes,
spencer graves

Sven.Knudsen@adeptscience.dk wrote:

Dear S group

I am currently evaluating the S-PLUS lme fucntion. The output I try to recreate is from PROC MIXED (SAS version 6.1). As far as I can understand, the two procedures base standard errors of variance components on minus the invers of the Hessian matrix; at lesat that is what the intervals method for lme object does. However, the std. erros differ from the SAS out put when extracted from an lme object via sqrt(diag(lme.obj$apVar)). Am I doing something wrong here? Few years ago, I heard a roumer that SAS did compute these values with error - is this what I am discovering here with SAS version 6.1?

Adept Scientific ApS

Sven Jesper Knudsen
Senior Consultant



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