[R-sig-ME] LMM: including ranef or not?

[Anna-Marie Corman]

Dear Ben and Christian,

thanks again for your help! I know the number of fixes per bird, though 
my dataset is on a trip basis. All individuals made a different number 
of trips during the study period.

I will try this out.

Best,
Anna

Am 21.07.2014 23:24, schrieb Ben Bolker:
>    If you're going to use ud95 as the response you might as well average
> the prop_land values per bird (i.e., aggregate the data down to a single
> data record per bird); the within-bird variation in prop_land values
> won't affect the model output at all (although the _number_ of
> observations per bird will; if you have unbalanced information in this
> way, you should incorporate weights proportional to the number of
> observations as well).
>
>    With only 6 colonies you're going to have some difficulty estimating
> the among-colony variance very well; if you end up with zero estimates
> of among-colony variance, you might want to use blme or set the colonies
> as fixed effects ...
>
>    If you use prop_land as the response variable you would indeed want to
> put bird_id in as a random effect (and you might consider estimating the
> proportional as a binomial (GLMM) response, _if_ you know the total
> number of fixes for each bird)
>
>