Dear R-help folks, Can someone guide me to a source where I can learn more about the / operator in model formulae? I found a reference to it in Venables and Ripley's MASS, p. 142, where it says, in reference to ANCOVA: "Terms of the form a/x, where a is a factor, are best thought of as 'separate regression models of type 1 + x within the levels of a.'..." This seems very appropriate to my analysis, where I am doing an ANCOVA of tree growth as a function of tree height (ht - continuous) separately for three species (spp) and three light levels (lt). The problem is, I'm not exactly sure how to interpret the results of this model specification, and I can't find any other references to it despite doing searches in the help pages, Google, Jonathon Baron's R site search, and other text books such as Dalgaard or Crawley. I've fit the model as: growth ~ spp*lt / ht -1, and compared the results to growth ~ spp*lt*ht. The coefficients are equivalent in both models, producing identical plots of predicted values. but the terms that appear in the summary table differ, as do the P-values, and I'm not sure how to interpret them. In the more standard model (growth ~ spp*lt*ht), I am clear on the fact that each level of the main effects is compared to the lowest level of that main effect (when using contr.treatment). But the alternative model (growth ~spp*lt / ht -1) contains all three levels of the main effect, spp. I'm not sure this is at all clear, but I am happy to try to clarify it. Thanks much in advance, Matt Landis R. Matthew Landis, Ph.D. Dept. Biology Middlebury College Middlebury VT 05753
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