Generate a model selection table of models with combinations (subsets) of fixed effect terms in the global model, with optional model inclusion rules.
dredge(global.model, beta = c("none", "sd", "partial.sd"), evaluate = TRUE,
  rank = "AICc", fixed = NULL, m.lim = NULL, m.min, m.max, subset,
  trace = FALSE, varying, extra, ct.args = NULL, deps = attr(allTerms0, "deps"),
  cluster = NULL,
  ...)# S3 method for model.selection
print(x, abbrev.names = TRUE, warnings = getOption("warn") != -1L, ...)
An object of class c("model.selection", "data.frame"), being a
data.frame, where each row represents one model.
See model.selection.object for its structure.
a fitted ‘global’ model object. See ‘Details’ for a list of supported types.
indicates whether and how the coefficients are standardized, and 
    must be one of "none", "sd" or "partial.sd". You can 
    specify just the initial letter. "none" corresponds to unstandardized
    coefficients, "sd" and "partial.sd" to coefficients 
    standardized by SD and Partial SD, respectively. For 
    backwards compatibility, logical value is also accepted, TRUE is 
    equivalent to "sd" and FALSE to "none". 
    See std.coef.
whether to evaluate and rank the models. If FALSE, a
	list of unevaluated calls is returned.
optionally, the rank function returning a sort of an information
    criterion, to be used instead AICc, e.g. AIC, QAIC or
    BIC.
	See ‘Details’.
optional, either a single-sided formula or a character vector giving names of terms to be included in all models. Not to be confused with fixed effects. See ‘Subsetting’.
optionally, the limits c(lower, upper)
    for the number of terms in a single model (excluding the intercept). An
    NA means no limit. See ‘Subsetting’.
    Specifying limits as m.min and m.max is allowed for backward
    compatibility.
logical expression or a matrix describing models to 
        be kept in the resulting set. NULL or TRUE 
        disables subsetting. For details, see ‘Subsetting’.
if TRUE or 1, all calls to the fitting function
	are printed before actual fitting takes place. If trace > 1, a progress bar
	is displayed.
optionally, a named list describing the additional arguments
	to vary between the generated models. Item names correspond to the
	arguments, and each item provides a list of choices (i.e. list(arg1 =
	list(choice1, choice2, ...), ...)). Complex elements in the choice list
	(such as family objects) should be either named (uniquely) or quoted
	(unevaluated, e.g. using alist, see quote),
	otherwise the result may be visually unpleasant. See example in
	Beetle.
optional additional statistics to be included in the result,
	provided as functions, function names or a list of such (preferably named
	or quoted). As with the rank argument, each function must accept as 
    an argument a fitted model object and return (a value coercible to) a
	numeric vector.
	This could be, for instance, additional information criteria or goodness-of-fit
	statistics. The character strings "R^2" and "adjR^2" are
	treated in a special way and add a likelihood-ratio based \(R^{2}\) and
	modified-\(R^{2}\) to the result, respectively (this is more efficient than using
	r.squaredLR directly).
a model.selection object, returned by dredge.
Should term names in the table header be abbreviated when
    printed? This is the default. If full names are required, use print() 
    explicitly with this argument set to FALSE.
if TRUE, errors and warnings issued during the model
	fitting are printed below the table (only with pdredge).
	To permanently remove the warnings, set the object's attribute
	"warnings" to NULL.
optional list of arguments to be passed to
	coefTable (e.g. dispersion parameter for glm
		affecting standard errors used in subsequent
		model averaging).
a “dependency matrix” as returned by getAllTerms, 
        attribute "deps". Can be used to fine-tune marginality 
        exceptions.
if a valid "cluster" object is given, it is used for
       parallel execution. If NULL or omitted, execution is 
       single-threaded.
With parallel calculation, an extra argument check is accepted.
See pdredge for details and examples.
optional arguments for the rank function. Any can be
    an unevaluated expression, in which case any x within it will be 
	substituted with the current model.
Kamil Bartoń
Models are fitted through repeated evaluation of the modified call extracted from
the global.model (in a similar fashion to update). This
approach, while having the advantage that it can be applied to most model types through the
usual formula interface, can have a considerable computational overhead.
Note that the number of combinations grows exponentially with the number of predictors (\(2^{N}\), less when interactions are present, see below).
The fitted model objects are not stored in the result. To get (a subset of)
the models, use get.models on the object returned by dredge.
Another way to get all the models is to run 
lapply(dredge(..., evaluate = FALSE), eval), 
which avoids fitting models twice.
For a list of model types that can be used as a global.model see
the list of supported models. Modelling functions that 
do not store a call in their result should be run via a 
wrapper function created by updateable.
rank is found by a call to match.fun and may be specified as a
function, a symbol, or as a character string specifying a function to be searched 
for from the environment of the call to dredge. It can be also a 
one-element named list, where the first element is taken as the rank function.
The function rank must accept a model object as its first argument and
always return a scalar.
By default, marginality constraints are respected, so that “all possible
combinations” include only those that contain interactions with their
respective main effects and all lower order terms,  unless the
global.model makes an exception to this principle (e.g. due
to a nested design such as a / b).
The resulting set of models can be constrained with three methods:
(1) set limits on
the number of terms in a model with m.lim, (2) bind term(s) to all
models with fixed, and (3) use subset for more complex rules.
To be included in the selection table, the formulation of a model must satisfy 
all these conditions.
subset can be an expression or a matrix.
If a matrix, it should be a logical, lower triangular matrix, with 
rows and columns corresponding to global.model terms. If this matrix has 
dimnames, they must match the term names (as returned by getAllTerms).
Unmatched names are silently ignored. Otherwise, if rows or columns are unnamed, 
they are matched positionally to the model terms, and dim(subset) must 
be equal to the number of terms. 
For example, subset["a", "b"] == FALSE excludes models 
with  both a and b terms; and if unnamed, subset, 
subset[2, 3] == FALSE will prevent the second and third terms of the 
global model from being both in the same model. 
demo(dredge.subset) has examples of using the subset matrix in 
conjunction with correlation matrices to exclude models containing collinear 
predictors.
In the form of an expression, the argument subset acts similarly
to that of subset() for data.frames. Model terms can be referred 
to by name as variables in the expression, except that they are interpreted as 
logical values indicating the presence of a term in the model.
The expression can contain any of the global.model term names, as well as
 names of the varying list items. global.model term names take
precedence when identical to names of varying, so to avoid ambiguity
varying variables in subset expression should be enclosed in
V() (e.g. V(family) == "Gamma") assuming that
varying is something like list(family = c("Gamma", ...))).
If elements of varying are unnamed, they are coerced into names. Calls 
and symbols are represented as character values (via "deparse"), and everything 
except numeric, logical, character and NULL values is represented by element 
numbers (e.g. subset = V(family) == 2 points to Gamma family in 
varying =list(family =list(gaussian, Gamma)). This can 
easily become obscure, so using named lists in varying is recommended.
Examples can be found in demo(dredge.varying).
Term names appearing in fixed and subset must be given exactly 
as they are returned by getAllTerms(global.model), which may differ
from the original term names (e.g. the interaction term components are ordered
alphabetically).
The with(x) and with(+x) notation indicates, respectively, any and
all interactions including the main effect term x. This is only effective
with marginality exceptions. The extended form with(x, order) allows to
specify the order of interaction of terms of which x is a part. For
instance, with(b, 2:3) selects models with at least one second- or
third-order interaction of variable b. The second (positional)
argument is coerced to an integer vector. The “dot” notation .(x) is
an alias for with.
The special variable `*nvar*` 
(backtick-quoted), in the subset expression is equal to the number of 
terms in the model (not the number of parameters).
To include a model term conditionally on the presence of another term, 
use dc (“dependency chain”) in
the subset expression. dc takes any number of term names as
arguments, and allows a term to be included only if all preceding ones
are also present (e.g. subset = dc(a, b, c) allows for models a,
a+b and a+b+c but not b, c, b+c or
a+c).
subset expression can have a form of an unevaluated call,
expression object, or a one-sided formula. See ‘Examples’.
Compound model terms (such as interactions, ‘as-is’ expressions within
I() or smooths in gam) should be enclosed within curly brackets
 (e.g. {s(x,k=2)}), or backticks (like non-syntactic
 names, e.g. 
 `s(x, k = 2)`
 ), except when they are arguments to with or dc.
 Backtick-quoted names must match exactly (including whitespace) the term names
 as returned by getAllTerms.
subset expression syntax summary
a & bindicates that model terms a and b must be present (see Logical Operators)
{log(x,2)} or `log(x, 2)`represent a complex
		model term log(x, 2)
V(x)represents a varying item x
with(x)indicates that at least one term containing the main effect term x must be present
with(+x)indicates that all the terms containing the main effect term x must be present
with(x, n:m)indicates that at least one term containing an n-th to m-th order interaction term of x must be present
dc(a, b, c,...)‘dependency chain’: b is allowed only if a is present, and c only if both a and b are present, etc.
`*nvar*`the number of terms in the model.
To simply keep certain terms in all models, it is much more efficient to use 
the fixed argument. The fixed formula is interpreted in the same
 manner as model formula, so the terms must not be quoted.
Use of na.action = "na.omit" (R's default) or "na.exclude"  in
global.model must be avoided, as it results with sub-models fitted to
different data sets if there are missing values. An error is thrown if it is
detected.
It is a common mistake to give na.action as an argument in the call
  to dredge (typically resulting in an error from the rank
  function to which the argument is passed through ‘...’), while the 
  correct way
  is either to pass na.action in the call to the global model or to set
  it as a global option.
If present in the global.model, the intercept will be included in all 
sub-models.
There are subset and
plot methods, the latter creates a
graphical representation of model weights and per-model term sum of weights.
Coefficients can be extracted with coef or coefTable.
get.models, model.avg. model.sel for
manual model selection tables.
Possible alternatives: glmulti in package glmulti
and bestglm (bestglm).
regsubsets in package leaps also performs all-subsets
regression.
Variable selection through regularization provided by various packages, e.g. glmnet, lars or glmmLasso.
# Example from Burnham and Anderson (2002), page 100:
#  prevent fitting sub-models to different datasets
oop <- 
options(na.action = "na.fail")
fm1 <- lm(y ~ ., data = Cement)
dd <- dredge(fm1)
subset(dd, delta < 4)
# Visualize the model selection table:
 if(require(graphics)) { 
par(mar = c(3,5,6,4))
plot(dd, labAsExpr = TRUE)
 } 
# Model average models with delta AICc < 4
model.avg(dd, subset = delta < 4)
#or as a 95% confidence set:
model.avg(dd, subset = cumsum(weight) <= .95) # get averaged coefficients
#'Best' model
summary(get.models(dd, 1)[[1]])
if (FALSE) {
# Examples of using 'subset':
# keep only models containing X3
dredge(fm1, subset = ~ X3) # subset as a formula
dredge(fm1, subset = expression(X3)) # subset as expression object
# the same, but more effective:
dredge(fm1, fixed = "X3")
# exclude models containing both X1 and X2 at the same time
dredge(fm1, subset = !(X1 && X2))
# Fit only models containing either X3 or X4 (but not both);
# include X3 only if X2 is present, and X2 only if X1 is present.
dredge(fm1, subset = dc(X1, X2, X3) && xor(X3, X4))
# the same as above, without "dc"
dredge(fm1, subset = (X1 | !X2) && (X2 | !X3) && xor(X3, X4))
# Include only models with up to 2 terms (and intercept)
dredge(fm1, m.lim = c(0, 2))
}
# Add R^2 and F-statistics, use the 'extra' argument
dredge(fm1, m.lim = c(NA, 1), extra = c("R^2", F = function(x)
    summary(x)$fstatistic[[1]]))
# with summary statistics:
dredge(fm1, m.lim = c(NA, 1), extra = list(
    "R^2", "*" = function(x) {
        s <- summary(x)
        c(Rsq = s$r.squared, adjRsq = s$adj.r.squared,
            F = s$fstatistic[[1]])
    })
)
# Add other information criteria (but rank with AICc):
dredge(fm1, m.lim = c(NA, 1), extra = alist(AIC, BIC, ICOMP, Cp))
options(oop)
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