Atle Torvik Kristiansen
2010-Oct-04 18:17 UTC
[R] glmer or not - glmer model specification
Hello, I'm having some trouble figuring out the correct model specification for my data. The system consists of multiple populations of an organism, which have been genetically sampled for several years. The problem is this: A minority of individuals are found in more than one sample, either they have survived into the next sampling at the same location, or have migrated to another another location and survived into the next sampling there. This pseudoreplication constitutes about 12% of all observations. I have information on the number of heterozygous locus per individual, its location, year, population size and number of immigrants at that location, and want to investigate the effect of population size and migration on heterozygosity through time. Heterozygosity, the response variable is a proportion, and I would like to account for the pseudoreplication. Their heterozygosity score will be the same for each sampling, and is constant. I have been trying with a mixed models approach, more specifically glmer (lme4 package) with a binomial distribution family and the response variable as an odds, eg. glmer(heterozygosity~1+population size+number of immigrants+year+(1| individual id)+(0+year|individual id)+(1+year|location),family=binomial) To my very basic understanding, this poses the following question: Is there a an effect of population size, number of immigrants and year, while taking into account a non-correlated random effect of time and individual, and a correlated random effect of year and location? Does anyone have any advice as to wether a mixed model is the best approach, and if so, what model specification to use? -- ----------------------------------------------------- Vennlig hilsen/Kind regards, Atle Torvik Kristiansen M.Sc. student Institutt for biologi (DU2-100) Realfagbygget NTNU 7491 Trondheim Norway Email: atletorvik at gmail.com atletorv at stud.ntnu.no