R help - Jun 2012 - multiple variance structure in lmer giving zero variances

Hi all,

I’m hoping someone might be able to help me out.  Forgive me if my mistake
is something simple.  I am new to mixed models, new to R, and new to lme4
and am struggling to figure everything out.  I have two questions that I am
hoping someone can answer.
1) Am I using the correct random structure for my model?
2) Can someone help me figure out what is wrong with my syntax to code for
random effect variance by treatment group?

These questions somewhat go together but let me tackle number one first.  I
was told by our statistician (who unfortunately doesn’t know R well) that
my model should include random effects for ID, ID*state, and ID*season.
If my understanding of lme4 code is correct, my random structure would
appear as it does in this model
M1<-lmer (y~trt*season*state*site+(1|ID)+(1|state)+(1|season), data=d)

Is this correct?  (I am starting with the fully crossed fixed effects and I
will use iterative model selection to find the optimal model after I make
sure that I have the correct random terms)

The second question is a bit more complicated and changes my random
structure as well.  I had originally built my model in nlme  and used the
multiple variance (varIdent) function to allow different variance for two
of my terms (trt and state) in my nlme model because different levels in
each term had different variances.  There are two levels in each of these
factors.  Treatment is G or S (basically treated or control groups) and
state is either Pre-treatment or Post-treatment.  What is happening in my
model is that the variance for the treated (G) is much smaller
post-treatment than pre-treatment.  Thus, overall, the variance of G is
less than S and the variance of Post is less than Pre.  My other fixed
factors are a site factor (two locations) and a season factor (breeding or
non-breeding season).  These ones have no issues.

I found a very helpful post (
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-mixed-models/2007q3/000248.html) on
how to also do this in lmer but it doesn’t seem to be working correctly for
me and I have not been able to figure out why.  I am also trying to do this
with 2 factors instead of one.
The overall structure of my data is
Structure of my dataset (d)
  ..@ frame   :'data.frame': 173 obs. of  10 variables:
  .. ..$ y     : int [1:173] 209 382 448 353 224 112 198 273 495 622 ...
  .. ..$ trt   : Factor w/ 2 levels "G","S": 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 ...
  .. ..$ season: Factor w/ 2 levels
"Breeding","NonBreeding": 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
1 1 1 ...
  .. ..$ state : Factor w/ 2 levels "Post","Pre": 1 1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1 1 ...
  .. ..$ site  : Factor w/ 2 levels "Mrak","Orchard": 1 1 1
1 1 2 2 1 1 1
...
  .. ..$ G     : num [1:173] 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
  .. ..$ ID    : Factor w/ 59 levels
"100","103","105",..: 11 19 22 58 6 36
50 11 20 24 ...
  .. ..$ S     : num [1:173] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
  .. ..$ Pre   : num [1:173] 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ...
  .. ..$ Post  : num [1:173] 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...

Following the recommendations from the post above, here is what I did to
try to obtain the different variances per treatment group.

d$G <- as.numeric(d$trt == "G")
d$S <- as.numeric(d$trt == "S")
d$Pre <- as.numeric(d$state == "Pre")
d$Post <- as.numeric(d$state == "Post")

m1<-lmer(y~trt*season*state*site+(0+G|ID)+(0+S|ID) +(0+Pre|ID) +
(0+Post|ID)+(1|season), data=d)

I then went to check what the variances for the random effects were and it
is unfortunately showing all of the variance for trt in the S group and all
of the variance for state in the Pre group with zero variance allocated to
the other groups.

Linear mixed model fit by REML
Formula: y ~ trt * season * state * site + (0 + G | ID) + (0 + S | ID) +
   (0 + Pre | ID) + (0 + Post | ID) + (1 | season)
   Data: d
  AIC  BIC logLik deviance REMLdev
 2257 2327  -1107     2387    2213
Random effects:
 Groups   Name        Variance Std.Dev.
 ID       Post            0.0    0.000
 ID       Pre         30688.9  175.183
 ID       S           30494.6  174.627
 ID       G               0.0    0.000
 season   (Intercept)  1436.8   37.905
 Residual             46594.9  215.859
Number of obs: 173, groups: ID, 59; season, 2

I’m not sure what I am doing wrong or even if I am remotely on the right
page here but I am out of ideas.  Can anyone help?

Sara

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