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Re: nlminb

To: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@pdf.com>
Subject: Re: nlminb
From: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 18:41:34 +0100 (BST)
Cc: yiwu ye <yiwu21111958@yahoo.com>, s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu
In-reply-to: <428B5E5E.7080702@pdf.com>
References: <20050518015747.39587.qmail@web52706.mail.yahoo.com> <428B5E5E.7080702@pdf.com>
On Wed, 18 May 2005, Spencer Graves wrote:

1. If the function you ask nlminb to minimize is the deviance, then that's included in the function output. I haven't tried this recently, but I believe I used to use constructs like the following:

          fit <- nlminb(...)

Then "fit$objective" should be the value of the objective function at the optimum.

2. Parameter correlations are not so easy with nlminb. Instead, I use "fit <- optim(..., hessian=T)" in library(MASS). If your objective function is the deviance, then 0.5*fit$hessian should be the inverse of the negative of the observed information matrix. I routinely compute eigen(0.5*fit$hessian, symmetric=TRUE) to check if it is of full rank. If it's not, the problem is overparameterized and you can't estimate everything -- or you need better starting values. If the hessian is of full rank, then its inverse provides the covariance matrix of the standard normal approximation to the distribution of fit$par. From that, you can compute the correlation matrix by dividing rows and columns by the product of the square roots of the diagonal elements.

It seems little known that vcov.nlminb in MASS does make them easy. The only documentation is in the book (MASS, 4th edition, p.439).


yiwu ye wrote:

Dear list,

I am using nlminb to estimate model parameters. How
can I get deviance of the fit and parameter
correlation information? Many thanks for your help,

Yiwu


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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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