I assume I'm missing something obvious here... The short form of my main question is: how do I extract variance components from an lme object? The longer form (plus optional supplementary question!): I'm looking at some quantitative genetics, and want to estimate two variance components so that I can then calculate a statistic called Qst from them. So I have this: reg1 <- lme(y ~ temp*food, random =~1|POP/SIRE/DAM, na.action=na.exclude)) summary(reg1) which shows me the random effects as standard deviations. I then want the SIRE and POP variance components (as Vsire and Vpop respectively) to put into the calculation of Qst as Qst <- Vpop/(Vpop + 8*Vsire) And obviously writing down the components and then plugging them in is not elegant. Especially as I then want to calculate the standard error for Qst, which leads me to my supplementary question... I could calculate the standard errors by bootstrapping, but it would probably be quicker to sample the relevant components from the likelihood, and calculate Qst from that. But I would need to know the distribution of the components. Can anyone point me in teh right direction to a reference on this? For balanced data it's easy, but what about un-balanced data? That wasn't an R query, but you can probably see whats' coming... If you know the answer to the last question, then how do I sample from the distribution? Again, if it's a gamma/chi^2 then I already know, but if not... Thanks in advance! Bob -- Bob O'Hara Rolf Nevanlinna Institute P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 5) FIN-00014 University of Helsinki Finland Telephone: +358-9-191 23743 Mobile: +358 50 599 0540 Fax: +358-9-191 22 779 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._