Hi, [note: 4th posting trial - apologize if the other ones would ever show up...] I have a (3-level) ordinal response data set which needs the integration of an spatial autocorrelation structure. What packages / functions are available to fit such a thing ? The heterogeneous, cluster-alike structuring of the autocorrelation seems to make a mixed effects model with random factors capturing the different sampling regions as ideal. I failed however to find a function in nlme/lme4 or other packages capable of fitting ordinal data, and package 'DPpackage' uses an approach I am not really familiar with; the function DPMolmm also triggers errors, even for the provided examples. There is no sound a-priori reason to believe that the proportional odds assumptions apply - they may, or may not. Anyways I don't have any preference to that specific kind of model, so any type of ordinal response model would be much appreciated ! I don't see a practical way of constructing a model out of 2 individual logistic regression models, but in case there is, I'd be happy to hear about ! BTW, I have no idea why my posts don't make it through lately. Is there some 'testing' newsgroup I can send dummy posts too, just to see if it works ? thanks a lot and cheers, Thomas