Hi R-users: Can anyone give an example of giving starting values for MCMCglmm? I can't find any anywhere. I have 1 random effect (physicians, and there are 50 of them) and family="ordinal"? How can I specify starting values for my fixed effects? It doesn't seem to have the option to do so. Thanks, Ping
Apparently not, since this your 3rd unanswered thread to r-help this month about this package. Please read the posting guide and find out where you should send questions about packages. Then you might get an answer. "ping chen" <chen1984612 at yahoo.com.cn> wrote in message news:975148.47160.qm at web15304.mail.cnb.yahoo.com...> Hi R-users: > > Can anyone give an example of giving starting values for MCMCglmm? > I can't find any anywhere. > I have 1 random effect (physicians, and there are 50 of them) > and family="ordinal". > > How can I specify starting values for my fixed effects? It doesn't seem to > have the option to do so. > > Thanks, Ping > > > > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >
Dear Ping, It is not possible to pass starting values for the fixed effects. It doesn't make much sense to give starting values for the fixed effects because they can be Gibbs sampled in a single pass conditional on the latent variables and the (co)variance components - after a single iteration they would "forget" their starting values. The cut points in an ordinal model are a different matter. At the moment I do not allow user defined starting values for the cut points, but agree that it may be useful. I am about to release an update that allows spline fitting in MCMCglmm. If it is starting values for the cut points you're really after I can add that in before I release? Cheers, Jarrod On 29 Mar 2010, at 22:06, ping chen wrote:> Hi R-users: > > Can anyone give an example of giving starting values for MCMCglmm? > I can't find any anywhere. > I have 1 random effect (physicians, and there are 50 of them) > and family="ordinal"? > > How can I specify starting values for my fixed effects? It doesn't > seem to have the option to do so. > > Thanks, Ping > > > >-- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.