bmerDist-class {blme}R Documentation

Bayesian Linear Mixed-Effects Model Prior Representations and bmer*Dist Methods

Description

Objects created in the initialization step of a blme model that represent the type of prior being applied.

Objects from the Class

Objects can be created by calls of the form new("bmerPrior", ...) or, more commonly, as side effects of the blmer and bglmer functions.

When using the main blme functions, the prior-related arguments can be passed what essentially are function calls with the distinction that they are delayed in evaluation until information about the model is available. At that time, the functions are defined in a special environment and then evaluated in an environment that directly inherits form the one in which blmer or bglmer was called. This is reflected in some of the prototypes of various prior-creating functions which depend on parameters not available in the top-level environment.

Finally, if the trailing parentheses are omitted from a blmer/bglmer prior argument, they are simply added as a form of “syntactic sugar”.

Prior Distributions

This section lists the prototypes for the functions that are called to parse a prior during a model fit.

Fixed Effect Priors

Covariance Priors

Residual Variance Priors

Evaluating Environment

The variables that the defining environment have populated are:

Methods

toString

Pretty-prints the distribution and its parameters.

References

Carvalho, Carlos M., Nicholas G. Polson, and James G. Scott. "Handling Sparsity via the Horseshoe." AISTATS. Vol. 5. 2009.

See Also

blmer() and bglmer(), which produce these objects, and bmerMod-class objects which contain them.


[Package blme version 1.0-5 Index]