R help - May 2013 - glmer.nb: function not in downloaded lme4 package?

Dear R Help,



I would like to use the glmer.nb function for mixed modelling using negative
binomial distribution please.



On the CRAN website apparently this function is called from the lme4 package
(version 0.99999911-1).



I have downloaded the latest version of the lme4 package (version 0.999999-2)
and have recently reinstalled the latest version of 64-bit R (version 3.0.1) but
after loading the package and calling:



library(lme4)

help(glmer.nb)

# I receive the following message:



No documentation for ‘glmer.nb’ in specified packages and libraries:
you could try ‘??glmer.nb’

# I called the glmer() function successfully, i.e.



glmer(CNos ~ Year+Month+(1|Vessel), data=Occ.cr, family=poisson,
offset=Occ.cr$logtrapd)



# but when I tried this:



glmer.nb(CNos ~ Year+Month+(1|Vessel), data=Occ.cr, offset=Occ.cr$logtrapd)



# I got the error message:



Error: could not find function "glmer.nb"



# Can you please provide advice on how I might use glmer.nb or alternative code
on how I might perform this analysis?



Thank you.



Regards,


Ross Marriott Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist

Stock Assessment and Data Analysis
Department of Fisheries WA
Western Australian Fisheries and Marine
Research Laboratories
PO Box 20, North Beach WA 6920, Australia.
Phone: +61 8 9203 0201 (office); 0434604131 (mobile)
Fax:    +61 8 9203 0199
Web: 
http://www.fish.wa.gov.au<https://mail.fish.wa.gov.au/owa/UrlBlockedError.aspx>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Ross Marriott <Ross.Marriott <at> fish.wa.gov.au> writes:
> 
> Dear R Help,
> 
> I would like to use the glmer.nb function for mixed modelling using
negative binomial distribution please.
> 
> On the CRAN website apparently this function is 
> called from the lme4 package (version 0.99999911-1).
> 
> I have downloaded the latest version of the lme4 package
>  (version 0.999999-2) and have recently
> reinstalled the latest version of 64-bit R (version 3.0.1)
>  but after loading the package and calling:
> 
  This question would probably be better on the
r-sig-mixed-models at r-project.org list.

   glmer.nb() is _only_ in development versions of lme4,
not in the stable version on CRAN, and furthermore it is
still quite new and poorly tested.  If you want to try it
out you are probably best of installing from github via
install_github in the devtools package.  Alternatively
you could try the glmmADMB package, on r-forge.
   
  Ben Bolker