Despite lots of investigation, I haven't found any R packages might be suitable 
for the following problem. I'd be very grateful for suggestions. 

I have three-way nested data, with a series of measures (obs) taken in quick 
succession (equal time spacing) from each subject on different days. The 
measures taken on the same day are temporally correlated, so I'd like to use an 
AR1 correlation structure for those, but treat subjects and days as nested 
random factors (random intercept) since there is little temporal correlation 
between days. The response is binary.    

So I need a GLMM with a correlation structure. I've tried using GEE, but the R 
packages can't cope with multilevel nested data. The only R function I've found 
that can do this is glmmPQL. 

m <- glmmPQL(y ~ f1 * f2 * f3 + (1|subj/day), correlation=corAR1(form 
=~obsno|subj/day))

f1 - f3 are fixed factors

However, PQL estimation is not recommended for binary response data. With no 
AIC and unreliable p values, model selection seems impossible! So my question 
is:

1) are there any other functions which are suitable for a GLMM with multilevel 
nested random effects and a AR1 correlation structure? Or is MCMC the only 
option?
2) to make things more complicated, I'd also like to include a varFunc variance 
structure to cope with heterogeneity. Is this possible in ML methods in R? I'd 
also like to extend to a multinomial response at a later stage. 

GEE seems the best bet, but I come unstuck with the three-way nested factors. 

Thanks for your help.

______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Reply via email to