Alex Ruder
2012-Jun-23 16:46 UTC
[R] Using at.level() with a MCMCglmm zero-inflated poisson model
I have a question for users of MCMCglmm that have experience implementing the zero-inflated poisson model. I find that the documentation, and previous questions, do not offer a lot of clear guidance on specifying and interpreting the zipoisson model. In particular, I see a lot of zero-inflated poisson examples that use the at.level(trait, x):variableName syntax. Specifically, the MCMCglmm course notes, available on the package's CRAN page, uses the following example on page 102: m5d.1 <- MCMCglmm(art ~ trait - 1 + at.level(trait, 1):fem + at.level(trait, 1):mar + at.level(trait, 1):kid5 + at.level(trait, 1):phd + at.level(trait, 1):ment, rcov = ~idh(trait):units, data = bioChemists, prior = prior.m5d.1, family = "zipoisson", verbose = FALSE) I have been unable to find an answer to the following questions and would appreciate any guidance: 1) Does at.level(trait, 1) index the poisson latent variable, or is that at.level(trait,2)? More generally, how does one find out what levels, and what values, are indexed with "trait"? 2) Why is the example specified only using the trait 1? That is, why not estimate the model in the following fashion: m5d.1 <- MCMCglmm(art ~ trait + trait:fem + trait:mar + trait:kid5 + trait:phd + trait:ment, rcov = ~idh(trait):units, data = bioChemists, prior = prior.m5d.1, family = "zipoisson", verbose = FALSE) 3) How do we properly interpret the results from the two models, say using summary(m5d.1) ? I would appreciate any pointers to relevant documentation/examples. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]