Zelig (version 4.2-1)

param: Generic Method for Simulating Ancillary/Auxillary Parameters of Zelig Models

Description

The param method is used by developers to specify simulated and fixed ancillary parameters of the Zelig statistical model. That is, this method is used between the zelig2 function and the qi as a helper function that specifies all the necessary details needed to simulate quantities of interest, given the fitted statistical model produced by the zelig2 function.

Usage

param(obj, num, ...)

Arguments

obj

a zelig object

num

an integer specifying the number of simulations to sample

...

optional parameters which will likely be ignored

Value

• The main purpose of the param function is to return a list of key-value pairs, specifuing information that should be shared between the qi function and the fitted statistical model (produced by the zelig2 function. This list can contain the following entries:
• simulations
  specifies a set of simulated parameters used to describe the statistical model's underlying distribution
• alpha
  specifies the fixed (non-simulated) ancillary parameters used by the statistical model's underlying distribution
• family
  specifies a family object used to implicitly define the link and linkinv functions. That is, this specifies the "link" and "inverse link" functions of generalized linear models
• link
  specifies the link function to be used. This parameter is largely unimportant compared to the "inverse link" function
• linkinv
  specifies the linkinv function to be used.

Examples

param.some.model <- function (obj, num, ...) {
  list(
       simulations = NULL,
       alpha = NULL,
       link = NULL,
       linkinv = NULL,
       fam = NULL
       )
}