gcmr (version 0.2)

gcmr: Fitting Gaussian Copula Marginal Regression Models by Maximum (Simulated) Likelihood.

Description

Fits Gaussian copula marginal regression models by maximum (simulated) likelihood.

Usage

gcmr(formula, data, subset, offset, contrasts=NULL, 
     marginal, cormat, start, fixed, options=gcmr.options())
gcmr.fit(x=rep(1,NROW(y)), y, offset=rep(0,NROW(y)), 
	 marginal, cormat, start, fixed, options=gcmr.options())

Arguments

formula

an object of class "formula" (or one that can be coerced to that class): a symbolic description of the model to be fitted.

data

an optional data frame, list or environment (or object coercible by as.data.frame to a data frame) containing the variables in the model. If not found in data, the variables are taken fr

subset

an optional vector specifying a subset of observations to be used in the fitting process.

offset

this can be used to specify an a priori known component to be included in the linear predictor during fitting. This should be NULL or a numeric vector of length equal to the number of cases. One or more

contrasts

an optional list. See the contrasts.arg of model.matrix.default.

x

a design matrix of dimension n * p.

y

vector of observations of length n.

marginal

an object of class marginal.gcmr specifying the marginal part of the model.

cormat

an object of class cormat.gcmr representing the correlation matrix of the errors.

start

optional numeric vector with starting values for the model parameters.

fixed

optional numeric vector of the same length as the total number of parameters. If supplied, only NA entries in fixed will be varied.

options

list of options passed to function gcmr.options.

Value

• An object of class "gcmr" with the following components:
• estimate
  the vector of parameter estimates.
• maximum
  the maximum (simulated) likelihood.
• hessian
  (minus) the Hessian at the maximum likelihood estimate.
• jac
  the Jacobian at the maximum likelihood estimate.
• y
  the y vector used.
• x
  the model matrix used.
• offset
  the offset used.
• n
  the number of observations.
• call
  the matched call.
• not.na
  the vector of binary indicators of missing observations.
• marginal
  the marginal model used.
• cormat
  the correlation matrix used.
• fixed
  the numeric vector indicating which parameters are constants.
• ibeta
  the indices of marginal parameters.
• igamma
  the indices of dependence parameters.
• options
  the fitting options used, see gcmr.options.
• Functions coefficients, logLik, vcov.gcmr, se and residuals.gcmr can be used to extract various useful features of the value returned by gcmr.

Details

Gaussian copula marginal regression models (Song, 2000; Masarotto and Varin, 2011) provide a flexible general framework for modelling dependent responses of any type. Gaussian copulas combine the simplicity of interpretation in marginal modelling with the flexibility in the specification of the dependence structure in multivariate normal models.

This package contains Rfunctions related to the paper Masarotto and Varin (2011). The main function is gcmr that fits Gaussian copula marginal regression models. Inference is performed through a likelihood approach. Computation of the exact likelihood is possible only for continuous responses, otherwise the likelihood function is approximated by importance sampling. See Masarotto and Varin (2011) for details.

For binomial marginals specified by bn.marg the response is specified as a factor when the first level denotes failure and all others success or as a two-column matrix with the columns giving the numbers of successes and failures.

gcmr.fit is the workhorse function: it is not normally called directly but can be more efficient where the response vector and design matrix have already been calculated.

References

Masarotto, G. and Varin, C. (2011). Gaussian copula marginal regression. Preprint.

Song, P. X.-K. (2000). Multivariate dispersion models generated from Gaussian copula. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 27, 305--320.

See Also

cormat.gcmr, marginal.gcmr, gcmr.options

Examples

## Warning: Likelihood approximated using only a limited number 
## of Monte Carlo replications.
## Polio data. Marginal negative binomial model with ARMA(2,1) correlation matrix.
data(polio)
gcmr(y~., data=polio, marginal=nb.marg(), cormat=arma.cormat(2,1), 
     options=list(seed=71271, nrep=100))
## Scotland lip cancer data. 
## Marginal negative binomial model with Matern correlation matrix.
data(scotland)
D.scotland <- spDists(cbind(scotland$longitude, scotland$latitude), longlat=TRUE)
gcmr(observed~offset(log(expected))+AFF+I(latitude/100), data=scotland, 
     marginal=nb.marg(), cormat=matern.cormat(D.scotland), 
     options=list(seed=71271, nrep=100))