See inline below.

On 12/11/13 11:28, Bert Gunter wrote:
This is not really an R question -- it is statistics.
In any case, you should do better posting this on the
R-Sig-Mixed-Models list, which concerns itself with matters like this.

However, I'll hazard a guess at an answer: maybe.  (Vague questions
elicit vague answers).

No! Nay! Never! Well, hardly ever. The ***y*** values will rarely be Gaussian.
(Think about a simple one-way anova, with 3 levels, and N(0,sigma^2) errors.
The y values will have a distribution which is a mixture of 3 independent Gaussian
distributions.)

You *may* wish to worry about whether the ***errors*** have a Gaussian
distribution.  Some inferential results depend on this, but in many cases
these results are quite robust to non-Gaussianity.

There.  I have exhausted my knowledge of the subject.

    cheers,

    Rolf

Cheers,
Bert

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 6:55 AM, peyman <zira...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi folks,

I am using the lme package of R, and am wondering if it is assumed that
the dependent factor (what we fit for; y in many relevant texts) has to
have a normal Gaussian distribution? Is there any margins where some
skewness in the data is accepted and how within R itself one could check
distribution of the data?

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