semEff (version 0.1.0)

bootEff: Bootstrap Effects

Description

Bootstrap model effects (standardised coefficients) and optional SEM correlated errors.

Usage

bootEff(mod, data = NULL, ran.eff = NULL, cor.err = NULL,
  R = 10000, seed = NULL, catch.err = TRUE, parallel = "snow",
  ncpus = NULL, cl = NULL, bM.arg = NULL, ...)

Arguments

mod

A fitted model object of class "lm", "glm", or "merMod", or a list or nested list of such objects.

data

An optional dataset used to first re-fit the model(s).

ran.eff

For mixed models with nested random effects, the name of the variable comprising the highest-level random effect. For non-nested random effects, specify "crossed". Non-specification of this argument when mod is a mixed model(s) will result in an error.

cor.err

Optional, names of SEM correlated errors to be bootstrapped. Should be of the form: c("mod1 ~~ mod2", "mod3 ~~ mod4", ...) (spaces optional), with names matching model names.

R

Number of bootstrap replicates to generate.

seed

Seed for the random number generator. If not provided, a random five-digit integer is used (see Details).

catch.err

Logical, should errors generated during model fitting or estimation be caught and NA returned for estimates? If FALSE, any such errors will cause the function to exit.

parallel

The type of parallel processing to use. Can be one of "snow", "multicore", or "no" (for none).

ncpus

Number of system cores to use for parallel processing. If NULL (default), all available cores are used.

cl

Optional cluster to use if parallel = "snow". If NULL (default), a local cluster is created using the specified number of cores.

bM.arg

A named list of any additional arguments to bootMer.

...

Arguments to stdCoeff.

Value

An object of class "boot" containing the bootstrapped effects, or a list/nested list of such objects.

Details

bootEff uses the boot function (primarily) to bootstrap effects from a fitted model or list of models (i.e. standardised coefficients, calculated using stdCoeff). Bootstrapping is typically nonparametric, i.e. coefficients are calculated from data where the rows have been randomly sampled with replacement. The number of replicates is set by default to 10,000, which should provide accurate coverage for confidence intervals in most situations. To ensure that data is resampled in the same way across individual bootstrap operations within the same run (e.g. models in a list), the same seed is set per operation, with the value saved as an attribute to the bootstrapped values (for reproducibility). The seed can either be user-supplied or a randomly-generated five-digit number (default), and is always re-initialised on exit (i.e. set.seed(NULL)).

Where weights are specified, bootstrapped effects will be a weighted average across the set of candidate models for each response variable, calculated after each model is first refit to the resampled dataset (specifying weights = "equal" will use a simple average instead). If no weights are specified and mod is a nested list of models, the function will throw an error, as it will be expecting weights for a presumed model averaging scenario. If instead the user wishes to bootstrap each individual model, they should recursively apply the function using rMapply (remember to set a seed).

Where names of models with correlated errors are specified to cor.err, the function will also return bootstrapped Pearson correlated errors (weighted.residuals) for those models. If weights are supplied and mod is a nested list, residuals will first be averaged across candidate models. If any two models (or candidate sets) with correlated errors were fit to different subsets of data observations, both models/sets are first refit to data containing only the observations in common.

For mixed models with nested random effects, the highest-level random effect (only) in the dataset is resampled, a procedure which should best retain the hierarchical structure of the data (Davison & Hinkley 1997, Ren et al. 2010). Lower-level groups or individual observations are not themselves resampled, as these are not independent. The name of this random effect must be supplied to ran.eff, matching the name in the data. Incidentally, this form of resampling will result in different sized datasets if observations are unbalanced across groups; however this should not generally be an issue, as the number of independent units (groups), and hence the 'degrees of freedom', remains unchanged. For non-nested random effects however (i.e. "crossed"), group resampling will not be appropriate, and (semi-)parametric bootstrapping is performed instead via bootMer in the lme4 package. Users should think carefully about whether their random effects are nested or not. NOTE: As bootMer takes only a fitted model as its first argument, any model averaging is calculated 'post-hoc' using the estimates in boot objects for each candidate model, rather than during the bootstrapping process itself (i.e. the default procedure via boot). Results are then returned in a new boot object for each response variable or correlated error estimate.

Parallel processing is used by default via the parallel package and option parallel = "snow" (and is generally recommended), but users can specify the type of parallel processing to use, or none. If "snow", a cluster of workers is created using makeCluster, and the user can specify the number of system cores to incorporate in the cluster (defaults to all available). bootEff then exports all required objects and functions to this cluster using clusterExport, after performing a (rough) match of all objects and functions in the current global environment to those referenced in the model call(s). Users should load any required external packages prior to calling the function.

References

Burnham, K. P., & Anderson, D. R. (2002). Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach (2nd ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag. Retrieved from https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9780387953649

Davison, A. C., & Hinkley, D. V. (1997). Bootstrap Methods and their Application. Cambridge University Press.

Ren, S., Lai, H., Tong, W., Aminzadeh, M., Hou, X., & Lai, S. (2010). Nonparametric bootstrapping for hierarchical data. Journal of Applied Statistics, 37(9), 1487<U+2013>1498. https://doi.org/dvfzcn

See Also

boot, bootMer, stdCoeff, weighted.residuals, avgEst

Examples

Run this code
# NOT RUN {
## Bootstrap Shipley SEM (while take a while...)
## Set 'site' as random effect group for resampling - highest-level

# }
# NOT RUN {
system.time(
  Shipley.SEM.Boot <- bootEff(Shipley.SEM, ran.eff = "site", seed = 53908,
                              ncpus = 2)
)
# }
# NOT RUN {
## Original estimates
lapply(Shipley.SEM.Boot, "[[", 1)

## Bootstrapped estimates
lapply(Shipley.SEM.Boot, function(i) head(i$t))
# }

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