Ancova simulation:Power Analysis - r

I am a college student taking a stats class on ecological design and need help figuring out how to go through a power analysis in R. I am using an ANCOVA design with no interaction; in this hypothetical experiment there are two flower varieties planted in independent plots and for each plot the explanatory variable collected is soil moisture with the response being flower yield.
I simulated a dataset called sim.flowers that has in it an alpha effect for the difference between flowers, a slope, an n for my x values, and a sigma for a normal distribution I will use in my y vector (following an ancova model of y = alpha + beta0 + beta1X; for simplicity I made the intercept 0) See below:
sim.flowers <- function(alpha,slope,n,sigma) {
x <-runif(2*n, min = -1, max = 1)
flower.effects <- rep(c(0,alpha),each=n) #there are two different flower varieties and I gave them a true difference of 1.
y <- flower.effects + slope * x + rnorm(2*n, 0, sigma)
data.frame(x=x,y=y,flower.effects = flower.effects)
}
I tested that out and it worked, it gave me a data set with an X a Y and column for flower effects
> test1 <- sim.oats(1,0.5,3,0.3)
> test1
x y flower.effects
1 -0.99913780 -0.31373866 0
2 -0.38610391 0.41070965 0
3 -0.58308522 0.07426254 0
4 -0.35900237 0.36395132 1
5 -0.07296464 1.29149447 1
6 0.18575996 0.85001847 1
The goal is to create a figure showing power to detect the flower Variety effect, with different lines for different numbers of replicates for each flower Variety treatment for this I was told to should choose only 1 value of the Soil Moisture effect.
And a figure showing power to detect the Soil Moisture effect, with different lines for different numbers of replicates for each flower Variety treatment, choosing 1 value of the flower Variety
To start to get here I ran a linear regression in a for loop so that I could extract p-values and be able to plot a power graph setting the probability to reject the null at 0.5 my code is below
> sim.flowers.many <- function(alpha,slope,n,sigma,numsimulations){
+ pvals <-numeric(numsimulations)
+ for(i in 1:numsimulations){
+ thisdat <-sim.flowers(alpha,slope,n,sigma)
+ thisfit <-lm(y~x,thisdat)
+ pvals[i]<-coefficients(summary(thisfit))['x','Pr(>|t|)']
+ }
+ return(pvals)
+ }
> sim.flowers.many( alpha = 1,slope = 0.5, n = 3, sigma = 6, numsimulations =3)
[1] 0.7662218 0.4454654 0.2414637
I seem to be getting p-values alright. I did the following with the expectation that I would get a dataframe with a column that states the probability of rejecting the null so that I could just plot it out.
> determine.power <- function(true.slopes){
+ true.slopes <-0:3
+ out<- data.frame(true.slopes,prob.reject.null=NA)
+ for(i in 1:length(true.slopes)){
+ thesepvals <- sim.flowers.many(alpha = 1,slope = 0.5, n = 3, sigma = 6, numsimulations =3)
+ out[i,2] <- mean(thesepvals < 0.05)
+ }
+ return(out)
+ }
I got this as an output:
> determine.power(true.slopes=0.5)
true.slopes prob.reject.null
1 0 0.0000000
2 1 0.0000000
3 2 0.3333333
4 3 0.3333333
And thought I could graph it out like this:
power.results <- determine.power(seq(0, 2, by = 0.2))
plot(prob.reject.null ~ true.slopes, data = power.results, main = "Power analysis", xlab = "true slope",
ylab = "Prob. reject null", ylim = c(0,1), type = "b", col = "slateblue4")
grid(col = "hotpink")
While I seem to be understanding the writing of the code needed for a power analysis I'm having trouble understanding how to create the two figures that I'm supposed to. I don't know how to change this code so that the power figures I generate reflect the effects of soil moisture and flower variety. I would appreciate any help with working through this problem and I apologize for the length but I felt it was necessary context for the question I am asking.

You can compare your results with pwr.f2.test{pwr}

Related

Why are the predicted values of my GLM cyclical?

I wrote a binomial regression model to predict the prevalence of igneous stone, v, at an archaeological site based on proximity to a river, river_dist, but when I use the predict() function I'm getting odd cyclical results instead of the curve I was expecting. For reference, my data:
v n river_dist
1 102 256 1040
2 1 11 720
3 19 24 475
4 12 15 611
Which I fit to this model:
library(bbmle)
m_r <- mle2(ig$v ~ dbinom(size=ig$n, prob = 1/(1+exp(-(a + br * river_dist)))),
start = list(a = 0, br = 0), data = ig)
This produces a coefficient which, when back-transformed, suggests about 0.4% decrease in the likelihood of igneous stone per meter from the river (br = 0.996):
exp(coef(m_r))
That's all good. But when I try to predict new values, I get this odd cycling of values:
newdat <- data.frame(river_dist=seq(min(ig$river_dist), max(ig$river_dist),len=100))
newdat$v <- predict(m_r, newdata=newdat, type="response")
plot(v~river_dist, data=ig, col="red4")
lines(v ~ river_dist, newdat, col="green4", lwd=2)
Example of predicted values:
river_dist v
1 475.0000 216.855114
2 480.7071 9.285536
3 486.4141 20.187424
4 492.1212 12.571487
5 497.8283 213.762248
6 503.5354 9.150584
7 509.2424 19.888471
8 514.9495 12.381805
9 520.6566 210.476312
10 526.3636 9.007289
11 532.0707 19.571218
12 537.7778 12.180629
Why are the values cycling up and down like that, creating crazy spikes when graphed?
In order for newdata to work, you have to specify the variables as 'raw' values rather than with $:
library(bbmle)
m_r <- mle2(v ~ dbinom(size=n, prob = 1/(1+exp(-(a + br * river_dist)))),
start = list(a = 0, br = 0), data = ig)
At this point, as #user20650 suggests, you'll also have to specify a value (or values) for n in newdata.
This model appears to be identical to binomial regression: is there a reason not to use
glm(cbind(v,n-v) ~ river_dist, data=ig, family=binomial)
? (bbmle:mle2 is more general, but glm is much more robust.) (Also: fitting two parameters to four data points is theoretically fine, but you should not try to push the results too far ... in particular, a lot of the default results from GLM/MLE are asymptotic ...)
Actually, in double-checking the correspondence of the MLE fit with GLM I realized that the default method ("BFGS", for historical reasons) doesn't actually give the right answer (!); switching to method="Nelder-Mead" improves things. Adding control=list(parscale=c(a=1,br=0.001)) to the argument list, or scaling the river dist (e.g. going from "1 m" to "100 m" or "1 km" as the unit), would also fix the problem.
m_r <- mle2(v ~ dbinom(size=n,
prob = 1/(1+exp(-(a + br * river_dist)))),
start = list(a = 0, br = 0), data = ig,
method="Nelder-Mead")
pframe <- data.frame(river_dist=seq(500,1000,length=51),n=1)
pframe$prop <- predict(m_r, newdata=pframe, type="response")
CIs <- lapply(seq(nrow(ig)),
function(i) prop.test(ig[i,"v"],ig[i,"n"])$conf.int)
ig2 <- data.frame(ig,setNames(as.data.frame(do.call(rbind,CIs)),
c("lwr","upr")))
library(ggplot2); theme_set(theme_bw())
ggplot(ig2,aes(river_dist,v/n))+
geom_point(aes(size=n)) +
geom_linerange(aes(ymin=lwr,ymax=upr)) +
geom_smooth(method="glm",
method.args=list(family=binomial),
aes(weight=n))+
geom_line(data=pframe,aes(y=prop),colour="red")
Finally, note that your third-farthest site is an outlier (although the small sample size means it doesn't hurt much).

How to increase the number of values returned by R MASS::profile?

The short question is: profile() returns 12 parameter values. How can it be made to return a greater number?
The motivation for my question is to reproduce Fig. 1.3 in Applied Logistic Regression 3rd Edition by David W. Hosmer Jr., Stanley Lemeshow and Rodney X. Sturdivant (2009), which plots the profile log likelihood against the coefficient for x = age over the confint() interval.
The glm model was
fit <- glm(chd ~ age, data = chdage, family = binomial(link = "logit"))
which relates the presence or absence of coronary heart disease to age for 100 patients. The results of the model agree with Table 1.3 in the text on p. 10.
For convenience, a csv file of the data is in my gist
Using the guidance provided by Ben Bolker for multiplying MASS::profile's output of deviance by -0.5 to convert to negative log-likelihood in a 2011 post using the tidy function provided by jebyrnes in later comment on the same post.
library(dplyr)
library(MASS)
library(purrr)
get_profile_glm <- function(aglm){
prof <- MASS:::profile.glm(aglm)
disp <- attr(prof,"summary")$dispersion
purrr::imap_dfr(prof, .f = ~data.frame(par = .y,
deviance=.x$z^2*disp+aglm$deviance,
values = as.data.frame(.x$par.vals)[[.y]],
stringsAsFactors = FALSE))
}
pll <- get_profile_glm(fit) %>% filter(par == "age") %>% mutate(beta = values) %>% mutate(pll = deviance * -0.5) %>% select(-c(par,values, deviance))
pll
> pll
beta pll
1 0.04895 -57.70
2 0.06134 -56.16
3 0.07374 -55.02
4 0.08613 -54.25
5 0.09853 -53.81
6 0.11092 -53.68
7 0.12332 -53.80
8 0.13571 -54.17
9 0.14811 -54.74
10 0.16050 -55.49
11 0.17290 -56.41
12 0.18529 -57.47
This can be plotted to obtain an approximation of the HLS figure 1.3 with the ablines for the alpha = 0.95 interval from
confint(fit)
and
logLik(fit)
The asymmetry in the legend can be calculated with
asymmetry <- function(x) {
ci <- confint(x, level = 0.95)
ci_lower <- ci[2,1]
ci_upper <- ci[2,2]
coeff <- x$coefficients[2]
round(100 * ((ci_upper - coeff) - (coeff - ci_lower))/(ci_upper - ci_lower), 2)
}
asym <- assymetry(fit)
The plot is produced with
ggplot(data = pll, aes(x = beta, y = pll)) +
geom_line() +
scale_x_continuous(breaks = c(0.06, 0.08, 0.10, 0.12, 0.14, 0.16)) +
scale_y_continuous(breaks = c(-57, -56, -55, -54)) +
xlab("Coefficient for age") +
ylab("Profile log-likelihood function") +
geom_vline(xintercept = confint(fit)[2,1]) +
geom_vline(xintercept = confint(fit)[2,2]) +
geom_hline(yintercept = (logLik(fit) - (qchisq(0.95, df = 1)/2))) +
theme_classic() +
ggtitle(paste("Asymmetry =", scales::percent(asym/100, accuracy = 0.1))) +
theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5))
Two adjustments are needed:
The curve should be smoothed by the addition of beta values and log likelihood values along the x and y axes, respectively.
The range of beta should be set comparably to approximately [0.0575,0.1625] (visually, from the figure). I assume this can be done by subsetting as required.
A note regarding the logLik y intercept on the figure. It appears to be based on a transposed value of log-likelihood. See Table 1-3 at p. 10, where it is given as -53.676546, compared to the equation on p. 19 where it is transposed to -53.6756.
Thanks to prompting from kjetil b halvorsen and the comment by Ben Bolker in the bbmle package vignette for mle2
– del Step size (scaled by standard error) (Default: zmax/5.) Presum- ably (?) copied from MASS::profile.glm, which says (in ?profile.glm): “[d]efault value chosen to allow profiling at about 10 parameter values.”
I "solved" my issue with a change to the get_profile_glm function in the original post:
prof <- MASS:::profile.glm(aglm, del = .05, maxsteps = 52)
which yielded 100 points and produced the plot I was hoping for:
I say "solved" because the values hardwired were determined by trial and error. But it must do for now.

Find the y-coordinate at intersection of two curves when x is known

Background and Summary of Objective
I am trying to find the y-coordinate at the intersection of two plotted curves using R. I will provide complete details and sample data below, but in the hopes that this is a simple problem, I'll be more concise up front.
The cumulative frequencies of two curves(c1 and c2 for simplicity) are defined by the following function, where a and b are known coefficients:
f(x)=1/(1+exp(-(a+bx)))
Using the uniroot() function, I found "x" at the intersection of c1 and c2.
I had assumed that if x is known then determining y should be simple substitution: for example, if x = 10, y=1/(1+exp(-(a+b*10))) (again, a and b are known values); however, as will be shown below, this is not the case.
The objective of this post is to determine how to find y-coordinate.
Details
This data replicates respondents' stated price at which they find the product's price to be too.cheap (i.e., they question its quality) and the price at which they feel the product is a bargain.
The data will be cleaned before use to ensure that too.cheap is
always less than the bargain price.
The cumulative frequency for the
bargain price will be inverted to become not.bargain.
The intersection of bargain and too.cheap will represent the point at
which an equal share of respondents feel the price is not a bargain
and too.cheap --- the point of marginal cheapness ("pmc").
Getting to the point where I'm having a challenge will take a number of steps.
Step 1: Generate some data
# load libraries for all steps
library(car)
library(ggplot2)
# function that generates the data
so.create.test.dataset <- function(n, mean){
step.to.bargain <- round(rnorm(n = n, 3, sd = 0.75), 2)
price.too.cheap <- round(rnorm(n = n, mean = mean, sd = floor(mean * 100 / 4) / 100), 2)
price.bargain <- price.too.cheap + step.to.bargain
df.temp <- cbind(price.too.cheap,
price.bargain)
df.temp <- as.data.frame(df.temp)
return(df.temp)
}
# create 389 "observations" where the too.cheap has a mean value of 10.50
# the function will also create a "bargain" price by
#adding random values with a mean of 3.00 to the too.cheap price
so.test.df <- so.create.test.dataset(n = 389, mean = 10.50)
Step 2: Create a data frame of cumulative frequencies
so.get.count <- function(p.points, p.vector){
cc.temp <- as.data.frame(table(p.vector))
cc.merged <- merge(p.points, cc.temp, by.x = "price.point", by.y = "p.vector", all.x = T)
cc.extracted <- cc.merged[,"Freq"]
cc.extracted[is.na(cc.extracted)] <- 0
return(cc.extracted)
}
so.get.df.price<-function(df){
# creates cumulative frequencies for three variables
# using the price points provided by respondents
# extract and sort all unique price points
# Thanks to akrun for their help with this step
price.point <- sort(unique(unlist(round(df, 2))))
#create a new data frame to work with having a row for each price point
dfp <- as.data.frame(price.point)
# Create cumulative frequencies (as percentages) for each variable
dfp$too.cheap.share <- 1 - (cumsum(so.get.count(dfp, df$price.too.cheap)) / nrow(df))
dfp$bargain.share <- 1 - cumsum(so.get.count(dfp, df$price.bargain)) / nrow(df)
dfp$not.bargain.share <- 1 - dfp$bargain.share# bargain inverted so curves will intersect
return(dfp)
}
so.df.price <- so.get.df.price(so.test.df)
Step 3: Estimate the curves for the cumulative frequencies
# Too Cheap
so.l <- lm(logit(so.df.price$too.cheap.share, percents = TRUE)~so.df.price$price.point)
so.cof.TCh <- coef(so.l)
so.temp.nls <- nls(too.cheap.share ~ 1 / (1 + exp(-(a + b * price.point))), start = list(a = so.cof.TCh[1], b = so.cof.TCh[2]), data = so.df.price, trace = TRUE)
so.df.price$Pr.TCh <- predict(so.temp.nls, so.df.price$price.point, lwd=2)
#Not Bargain
so.l <- lm(logit(not.bargain.share, percents = TRUE) ~ price.point, so.df.price)
so.cof.NBr <- coef(so.l)
so.temp.nls <- nls(not.bargain.share ~ 1 / (1 + exp(-(a + b * price.point))), start = list(a = so.cof.NBr[1], b = so.cof.Br[2]), data= so.df.price, trace=TRUE)
so.df.price$Pr.NBr <- predict(so.temp.nls, so.df.price$price.point, lwd=2)
# Thanks to John Fox & Sanford Weisberg - "An R Companion to Applied Regression, second edition"
At this point, we can plot and compare the "observed" cumulative frequencies against the estimated frequencies
ggplot(data = so.df.price, aes(x = price.point))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.TCh, colour = "Too Cheap"))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.NBr, colour = "Not Bargain"))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$too.cheap.share, colour = "too.cheap.share"))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$not.bargain.share, colour = "not.bargain.share"))+
scale_y_continuous(name = "Cummulative Frequency")
The estimate appears to fit the observations reasonably well.
Step 4: Find the intersection point for the two estimate functions
so.f <- function(x, a, b){
# model for the curves
1 / (1 + exp(-(a + b * x)))
}
# note, this function may also be used in step 3
#I was building as I went and I don't want to risk a transpositional error that breaks the example
so.pmc.x <- uniroot(function(x) so.f(x, so.cof.TCh[1], so.cof.TCh[2]) - so.f(x, so.cof.Br[1], so.cof.Br[2]), c(0, 50), tol = 0.01)$root
We may visually test the so.pmc.x by plotting it with the two estimates. If it is correct, a vertical line for so.pmc.x should pass through the intersection of too.cheap and not.bargain.
ggplot(data = so.df.price, aes(x = price.point)) +
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.TCh, colour = "Too Cheap")) +
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.NBr, colour = "Not Bargain")) +
scale_y_continuous(name = "Cumulative Frequency") +
geom_vline(aes(xintercept = so.pmc.x))
...which it does.
Step 5: Find y
Here is where I get stumped, and I'm sure I'm overlooking something very basic.
If a curve is defined by f(x) = 1/(1+exp(-(a+bx))), and a, b and x are all known, then shouldn't y be the result of 1/(1+exp(-(a+bx))) for either estimate?
In this instance, it is not.
# We attempt to use the too.cheap estimate to find y
so.pmc.y <- so.f(so.pmc.x, so.cof.TCh[1], so.cof.TCh[2])
# In theory, y for not.bargain at price.point so.pmc.x should be the same
so.pmc.y2 <- so.f(so.pmc.x, so.cof.NBr[1], so.cof.NBr[2])
EDIT: This is where the error occurs (see solution below).
a != so.cof.NBr[1] and b != so.cof.NBr[2], instead a and be should be defined as the coefficients from so.temp.nls (not so.l)
# Which they are
#> so.pmc.y
#(Intercept)
# 0.02830516
#> so.pmc.y2
#(Intercept)
# 0.0283046
If we calculate the correct value for y, a horizontal line at yintercept = so.pmc.y, should pass through the intersection of too.cheap and not.bargain.
...which it obviously does not.
So how does one estimate y?
I've solved this, and as I suspected, it was a simple error.
My assumption that y = 1/(1+exp(-(a+bx))) is correct.
The issue is that I was using the wrong a, b coefficients.
My curve was defined using the coefficients in so.cof.NBr as defined by so.l.
#Not Bargain
so.l <- lm(logit(not.bargain.share, percents = TRUE) ~ price.point, so.df.price)
so.cof.NBr <- coef(so.l)
so.temp.nls <- nls(not.bargain.share ~ 1 / (1 + exp(-(a + b * price.point))), start = list(a = so.cof.NBr[1], b = so.cof.Br[2]), data= so.df.price, trace=TRUE)
so.df.price$Pr.NBr <- predict(so.temp.nls, so.df.price$price.point, lwd=2)
But the resulting curve is so.temp.nls, NOT so.l.
Therefore, once I find so.pmc.x I need to extract the correct coefficients from so.temp.nls and use those to find y.
# extract coefficients from so.temp.nls
so.co <- coef(so.temp.nls)
# find y
so.pmc.y <- 1 / (1 + exp(-(so.co[1] + so.co[2] * so.pmc.x)))
ggplot(data = so.df.price, aes(x = price.point))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.TCh, colour = "Too Cheap"))+
geom_line(aes(y = so.df.price$Pr.NBr, colour = "Not Bargain"))+
scale_y_continuous(name = "Cumulative Frequency")+
geom_hline(aes(yintercept = so.pmc.y))
Yielding the following...
which graphically depicts the correct answer.

MCMCglmm binomial model prior

I want to estimate a binomial model with the R package MCMCglmm. The model shall incorporate an intercept and a slope - both as fixed and random parts. How do I have to specify an accepted prior? (Note, here is a similar question, but in a much more complicated setting.)
Assume the data have the following form:
y x cluster
1 0 -0.56047565 1
2 1 -0.23017749 1
3 0 1.55870831 1
4 1 0.07050839 1
5 0 0.12928774 1
6 1 1.71506499 1
In fact, the data have been generated by
set.seed(123)
nj <- 15 # number of individuals per cluster
J <- 30 # number of clusters
n <- nj * J
x <- rnorm(n)
y <- rbinom(n, 1, prob = 0.6)
cluster <- factor(rep(1:nj, each = J))
dat <- data.frame(y = y, x = x, cluster = cluster)
The information in the question about the model, suggest to specify fixed = y ~ 1 + x and random = ~ us(1 + x):cluster. With us() you allow the random effects to be correlated (cf. section 3.4 and table 2 in Hadfield's 2010 jstatsoft-article)
First of all, as you only have one dependent variable (y), the G part in the prior (cf. equation 4 and section 3.6 in Hadfield's 2010 jstatsoft-article) for the random effects variance(s) only needs to have one list element called G1. This list element isn't the actual prior distribution - this was specified by Hadfield to be an inverse-Wishart distribution. But with G1 you specify the parameters of this inverse-Whishart distribution which are the scale matrix ( in Wikipedia notation and V in MCMCglmm notation) and the degrees of freedom ( in Wikipedia notation and nu in MCMCglmm notation). As you have two random effects (the intercept and the slope) V has to be a 2 x 2 matrix. A frequent choice is the two dimensional identity matrix diag(2). Hadfield often uses nu = 0.002 for the degrees of freedom (cf. his course notes)
Now, you also have to specify the R part in the prior for the residual variance. Here again an inverse-Whishart distribution was specified by Hadfield, leaving the user to specify its parameters. As we only have one residual variance, V has to be a scalar (lets say V = 0.5). An optional element for R is fix. With this element you specify, whether the residual variance shall be fixed to a certain value (than you have to write fix = TRUE or fix = 1) or not (then fix = FALSE or fix = 0). Notice, that you don't fix the residual variance to be 0.5 by fix = 0.5! So when you find in Hadfield's course notes fix = 1, read it as fix = TRUE and look to which value of V it is was fixed.
All togehter we set up the prior as follows:
prior0 <- list(G = list(G1 = list(V = diag(2), nu = 0.002)),
R = list(V = 0.5, nu = 0.002, fix = FALSE))
With this prior we can run MCMCglmm:
library("MCMCglmm") # for MCMCglmm()
set.seed(123)
mod0 <- MCMCglmm(fixed = y ~ 1 + x,
random = ~ us(1 + x):cluster,
data = dat,
family = "categorical",
prior = prior0)
The draws from the Gibbs-sampler for the fixed effects are found in mod0$Sol, the draws for the variance parameters in mod0$VCV.
Normally a binomial model requires the residual variance to be fixed, so we set the residual variance to be fixed at 0.5
set.seed(123)
prior1 <- list(G = list(G1 = list(V = diag(2), nu = 0.002)),
R = list(V = 0.5, nu = 0.002, fix = TRUE))
mod1 <- MCMCglmm(fixed = y ~ 1 + x,
random = ~ us(1 + x):cluster,
data = dat,
family = "categorical",
prior = prior1)
The difference can be seen by comparing mod0$VCV[, 5] to mod1$VCV[, 5]. In the later case, all entries are 0.5 as specified.

MCMCglmm multinomial model in R

I'm trying to create a model using the MCMCglmm package in R.
The data are structured as follows, where dyad, focal, other are all random effects, predict1-2 are predictor variables, and response 1-5 are outcome variables that capture # of observed behaviors of different subtypes:
dyad focal other r present village resp1 resp2 resp3 resp4 resp5
1 10101 14302 0.5 3 1 0 0 4 0 5
2 10405 11301 0.0 5 0 0 0 1 0 1
…
So a model with only one outcome (teaching) is as follows:
prior_overdisp_i <- list(R=list(V=diag(2),nu=0.08,fix=2),
G=list(G1=list(V=1,nu=0.08), G2=list(V=1,nu=0.08), G3=list(V=1,nu=0.08), G4=list(V=1,nu=0.08)))
m1 <- MCMCglmm(teaching ~ trait-1 + at.level(trait,1):r + at.level(trait,1):present,
random= ~idh(at.level(trait,1)):focal + idh(at.level(trait,1)):other +
idh(at.level(trait,1)):X + idh(at.level(trait,1)):village,
rcov=~idh(trait):units, family = "zipoisson", prior=prior_overdisp_i,
data = data, nitt = nitt.1, thin = 50, burnin = 15000, pr = TRUE, pl = TRUE, verbose = TRUE, DIC = TRUE)
Hadfield's course notes (Ch 5) give an example of a multinomial model that uses only a single outcome variable with 3 levels (sheep horns of 3 types). Similar treatment can be found here: http://hlplab.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/multinomial-random-effects-models-in-r/ This is not quite right for what I'm doing, but contains helpful background info.
Another reference (Hadfield 2010) gives an example of a multi-response MCMCglmm that follows the same format but uses cbind() to predict a vector of responses, rather than a single outcome. The same model with multiple responses would look like this:
m1 <- MCMCglmm(cbind(resp1, resp2, resp3, resp4, resp5) ~ trait-1 +
at.level(trait,1):r + at.level(trait,1):present,
random= ~idh(at.level(trait,1)):focal + idh(at.level(trait,1)):other +
idh(at.level(trait,1)):X + idh(at.level(trait,1)):village,
rcov=~idh(trait):units,
family = cbind("zipoisson","zipoisson","zipoisson","zipoisson","zipoisson"),
prior=prior_overdisp_i,
data = data, nitt = nitt.1, thin = 50, burnin = 15000, pr = TRUE, pl = TRUE, verbose = TRUE, DIC = TRUE)
I have two programming questions here:
How do I specify a prior for this model? I've looked at the materials mentioned in this post but just can't figure it out.
I've run a similar version with only two response variables, but I only get one slope - where I thought I should get a different slope for each resp variable. Where am I going wrong, or having I misunderstood the model?
Answer to my first question, based on the HLP post and some help from a colleage/stats consultant:
# values for prior
k <- 5 # originally: length(levels(dative$SemanticClass)), so k = # of outcomes for SemanticClass aka categorical outcomes
I <- diag(k-1) #should make matrix of 0's with diagonal of 1's, dimensions k-1 rows and k-1 columns
J <- matrix(rep(1, (k-1)^2), c(k-1, k-1)) # should make k-1 x k-1 matrix of 1's
And for my model, using the multinomial5 family and 5 outcome variables, the prior is:
prior = list(
R = list(fix=1, V=0.5 * (I + J), n = 4),
G = list(
G1 = list(V = diag(4), n = 4))
For my second question, I need to add an interaction term to the fixed effects in this model:
m <- MCMCglmm(cbind(Resp1, Resp2...) ~ -1 + trait*predictorvariable,
...
The result gives both main effects for the Response variables and posterior estimates for the Response/Predictor interaction (the effect of the predictor variable on each response variable).

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