more on old and new lme4

Posted on June 24, 2014 Updated on July 10, 2014

(This is another guest post by Klinton Bicknell.)

This is an update to my previous blog post, in which I observed that post-version-1.0 versions of the lme4 package yielded worse model fits than old pre-version-1.0 versions for typical psycholinguistic datasets, and I gave instructions for installing the legacy lme4.0 package. As I mentioned there, however, lme4 is under active development, the short version of this update post is to say that it seems that the latest versions of the post-version-1.0 lme4 now yield models that are just as good, and often better than lme4.0! This seems to be due to the use of a new optimizer, better convergence checking, and probably other things too. Thus, installing lme4.0 now seems only useful in special situations involving old code that expects the internals of the models to look a certain way. Life is once again easier thanks to the furious work of the lme4 development team!

[update: Since lme4 1.1-7 binaries are now on CRAN, this paragraph is obsolete.] One minor (short-lived) snag is that the current version of lme4 on CRAN (1.1-6) is overzealous in displaying convergence warnings, and displays them inappropriately in many cases where models have in fact converged properly. This will be fixed in 1.1-7 (more info here). To avoid them for now, the easiest thing to do is probably to install the current development version of lme4 1.1-7 from github like so:

library("devtools"); install_github("lme4/lme4")

Read on if you want to hear more details about my comparisons of the versions.

Read the rest of this entry »

old and new lme4

Posted on March 17, 2014 Updated on June 24, 2014

(This is a guest post by Klinton Bicknell.)

update 2014-06-24: Using lme4.0 probably isn’t necessary anymore. See post here.

The lme4 package‘s major 1.0 release was back in August. I and others have noticed that for typical psycholinguistic datasets, the new >=1.0 versions of lme4 often yield models with substantially poorer fits to the data than the old pre-1.0 versions (sometimes worse by many points of log likelihood), which suggests that the new lme4 isn’t as reliably converging to the actual maximum likelihood (or REML) solution. Since unconverged models yield misleading inferences about model parameters, it’s useful to be able to fit models using the old pre-1.0 lme4.

Happily, the lme4 developers have created a new package (named “lme4.0”), which is a bugfix-only version of the old pre-1.0 lme4. This allows for the installation of both old and new versions of lme4 side-by-side. As of this posting, lme4.0 is not yet on CRAN, but is installable by performing the following steps: Read the rest of this entry »