Hi, I have created a global model using lmer knowing it contains at least one fixed effect which has missing values. I add the term na.action=na.omit to the model formula as shown below, and the summary output is produced fine, until I wish to simplify the model and compare the resulting model with the previous one using anova. As soon as the covariate containing the missing values is removed, the number of observations in the new reduced model increases and the two models become incomparable. I am using the update function to sequentially remove fixed effects. Is there a function, perhaps to increase the number of observations simply to enable the comparison, and to avoid subsetting the data (by removing all the NA values from all the variables before the analysis even begins) so that the reduced model can then make use of all the available data for the predictions? The error example: (say 'pairexp' has 23 missing values) lmm.1<-lmer(survival~Male+FemAge+pairexp+(1|ID),REML=FALSE,na.action=na.omit) summary(lmm.1) lmm.2<-update(lmm.1,.~.-pairexp) summary(lmm.2) anova(lmm.1,lmm.2) lmm.2: survival ~ Male + FemAge + (1 | ID) lmm.1: survival ~ Male + FemAge + pairexp + (1 | ID) Df AIC BIC logLik Chisq Chi Df Pr(>Chisq) lmm.1 4 -1006.41 -993.92 507.21 lmm.1 5 -934.88 -919.60 472.44 0 1 1 Apologies if there is a simple solution to this that I've missed. Any suggestions on how to deal with this would be welcome. I have checked the R help posts but not found anything alone these lines. Thanks, Sam -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Model-comparison-with-missing-values-tp25005296p25005296.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.