Mixed models are hard.
They’re abstract, they’re a little weird, and there is not a common vocabulary or notation for them.
But they’re also extremely important to understand because many data sets require their use.
Repeated measures ANOVA has too many limitations. It just doesn’t cut it any more.
One of the most difficult parts of fitting mixed models is figuring out which random effects to include in a model. And that’s hard to do if you don’t really understand what a random effect is or how it differs from a fixed effect. (more…)
In fixed-effects models (e.g., regression, ANOVA, generalized linear models), there is only one source of random variability. This source of variance is the random sample we take to measure our variables.
It may be patients in a health facility, for whom we take various measures of their medical history to estimate their probability of recovery. Or random variability may come from individual students in a school system, and we use demographic information to predict their grade point averages.
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If you are new to using generalized linear mixed effects models, or if you have heard of them but never used them, you might be wondering about the purpose of a GLMM.
Mixed effects models are useful when we have data with more than one source of random variability. For example, an outcome may be measured more than once on the same person (repeated measures taken over time).
When we do that we have to account for both within-person and across-person variability. A single measure of residual variance can’t account for both.
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