R help - Sep 2008 - Mixed effects model with binomial errors - problem

Hi, 
We released individual birds into a room with 2 trees. We counted the number
of visits to each of the 2 tree. One of the trees is always a control tree
and the other tree is either  treatment 1, treatment 2 or treatment3 or
treatment 4. 


Ind	Treat ContrTree	ExpTree	Total visits
1	1	11	16	27
1	2	6	9	15
1	3	5	13	18
1	4	11	25	36
2	1	2	3	5
4	1	6	7	13
4	3	4	4	8
4	4	2	5	7
6	1	1	1	2
6	4	5	16	21
etc
etc

(as you see, not all treatments are included for all individuals)

Our question is if the proportion of visits to the experimental tree, in
relation to the total number of visits to both trees differs between
treatments.


We have made treatment and individual into a factor
All individuals were subjected to a maximum of 4  treatments, so
'individual' is a random factor


We came up with this model:
model1<-lmer(cbind(ExpTree,Total visits-ExpTree)~ Treat
+(1|Ind),method="ML"
, family=binomial, data=r))

However, the error we get is this:

Error in match.arg(method, c("Laplace", "AGQ")) : 
  'arg' should be one of ?Laplace?, ?AGQ?


HELP!


-- 
View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/Mixed-effects-model-with-binomial-errors----problem-tp19413327p19413327.html
Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

RFTW <l.temarvelde <at> nioo.knaw.nl> writes:

> Our question is if the proportion of visits to the experimental tree, in
> relation to the total number of visits to both trees differs between
> treatments.
> 
> We have made treatment and individual into a factor
> All individuals were subjected to a maximum of 4  treatments, so
> 'individual' is a random factor
> 
> We came up with this model:
> model1<-lmer(cbind(ExpTree,Total visits-ExpTree)~ Treat
+(1|Ind),method="ML"
> , family=binomial, data=r))
  why not leave out method="ML" and see what happens?
  for the current iteration of lmer, REML is not a possibility
in any case.  The default "Laplace" method should work OK.

   I'd be slightly worried about your variable name with a space
in it (`Total visits`) -- are you sure that is working as expected?

  For further questions along these lines I would suggest
e-mailing r-sig-mixed-models at lists.r-project.org instead ...

  Ben Bolker