Hi to everyone, I'm a PhD student and I'm involved in non parametric analyses of hierarchical models. I tried to use package DPpackage on my data, but I encountered some problems in interpreting ouputs. Can anybody help me? The problem can be remued as follows: I have a logit hierarchical model for survival (i.e. binary response) in patients affected by heart failure (the court consists of n=536 subjects), admitted in J different hospitals. The idea is to explain survival by means of linear predictor of relevant covariates with a random effect on grouping factor, represented by hospital of dmission. The main goal would be the reconstruction of random effect density, because we are interest in founding (if present) groups of "similar" hospitals. Now, I found some trouble in doing this beause I don't understand how outputs "ss", "ncluster" and "mub" work. Particullary, how does the package compute "ss" starting from "ncluster" distribution? How should I interpret the vector "mub"? I tried to look into the fortrand code, but I'm not used to that language so it didn't help me a lot. Could anybody make me understand how "ss" and "ncluster" are related, and how to build the predictive densities of the random effect starting from "mub"s elements? It would be a great gain in my work. Looking forward to hear news from you thanks a lot in advance Regards Francesca Ieva -- ----- Francesca Ieva MOX - Modeling and Scientific Computing Dipartimento di Matematica "F.Brioschi" Politecnico di Milano Via Bonardi 9, 20133 Milano, Italy mailto: francesca.ieva at fastwebnet.it francesca.ieva at mail.polimi.it Voice: +39 02 2399 4604 Skype: francesca.ieva -----