Hi, I am trying to fit a ordinal GEE model using ordgee {geepack}. In order to check the validity of the function, I specified the correlation structure as independence (i.e. constr = "independence") and compared the result with that using polr {MASS}. Because a GEE model with an independent working correlation structure is equivalent to an ordinary GLM model, we would expect the same results from both functions (there might be small differences due to dissimilarity in approximation methods). However, I got a very different results from the two approaches. Here is my R codes and ouputs for the two approaches: 1.) library(geepack)summary(ordgee(UACR~HR+SP+bmi+diabetes+age+HDL+ht.med+male+SCHV+SCRV+smoke+statin+AP,id=x18,mean.link="logit",corstr="independence")) Call: ordgee(formula = UACR ~ HR + SP + bmi + diabetes + age + HDL + ht.med + male + SCHV + SCRV + smoke + statin + AP, id = x18, mean.link = "logit", corstr = "independence") Mean Model: Mean Link: logit Variance to Mean Relation: binomial Coefficients: estimate san.se wald p Inter:0 -1.5843906608 2.408716706 4.326663e-01 0.510683514 Inter:1 -2.6094525748 2.401539294 1.180645e+00 0.277224675 Inter:2 -3.6006918946 2.410172287 2.231905e+00 0.135187061 HR 0.0491831800 0.018913783 6.762020e+00 0.009311831 SP -0.0287228998 0.011465183 6.276168e+00 0.012237244 bmi 0.0363585224 0.029345236 1.535102e+00 0.215348334 diabetes 0.2557417872 0.464391207 3.032742e-01 0.581837057 age 0.0188629344 0.022226239 7.202555e-01 0.396060127 HDL -0.0210835675 0.014822770 2.023156e+00 0.154916842 ht.med 0.0089636059 0.383824776 5.453804e-04 0.981368392 male 1.2806017705 0.473921757 7.301547e+00 0.006889526 SCHV -0.0008670472 0.005862042 2.187699e-02 0.882414803 SCRV 0.5667065765 0.879731084 4.149699e-01 0.519457682 smoke -0.6064323366 0.352556881 2.958737e+00 0.085414655 statin -0.0008867941 0.408462933 4.713465e-06 0.998267753 AP 0.1159595043 0.036258436 1.022809e+01 0.001383178 Scale is fixed. Correlation Model: Correlation Structure: independence Returned Error Value: 0 Number of clusters: 285 Maximum cluster size: 6 2.) library(MASS) summary(polr(UACR~HR+SP+bmi+diabetes+age+HDL+ht.med+male+SCHV+SCRV+smoke+statin+AP,method="logistic")) Re-fitting to get Hessian Call: polr(formula = UACR ~ HR + SP + bmi + diabetes + age + HDL + ht.med + male + SCHV + SCRV + smoke + statin + AP, method = "logistic") Coefficients: Value Std. Error t value HR 0.0004674288 0.009690505 0.048235757 SP -0.0106449514 0.005305501 -2.006398816 bmi 0.0298158386 0.015501658 1.923396794 diabetes 0.6563205176 0.251591908 2.608671009 age 0.0034051085 0.010467630 0.325298895 HDL -0.0153783914 0.006227563 -2.469407699 ht.med -0.1146770998 0.194130303 -0.590722303 male 0.1798842955 0.227476463 0.790782014 SCHV 0.0022770371 0.002675591 0.851040793 SCRV 0.0010954808 0.440261143 0.002488252 smoke 0.0207174113 0.165287870 0.125341390 statin 0.4320833418 0.206676105 2.090630370 AP 0.0419551861 0.015799215 2.655523401 Intercepts: Value Std. Error t value 0|1 -0.9883 1.1258 -0.8778 1|2 0.1712 1.1246 0.1522 2|3 1.3306 1.1258 1.1819 Residual Deviance: 1376.931 AIC: 1408.931 Is there anything wrong with my code? I guess my real question should be, could I safely use the ordgee program to fit a ordinal GEE model with exchangeable correlation structure? Thanks very much for your time and professional opinion, High Seng [[alternative HTML version deleted]]