There are lots of choices for fitting generalized linear mixed effects models within R, but if you want to include smooth functions of covariates, the choices are limited. One option is to fit the model using gamm() from the mgcv ???? or gamm4() from the gamm4 ????, which use lme() (nlme ????) or ...

Last semester (Fall 2020) I taught a new course in healthcare data science for the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School in Public Policy. One of the final topics of the course was querying application programming interfaces (APIs) from within R. The example we used was querying data on the Covid 19 pandemic from ...

While the Covid-19 pandemic and teaching a new course in the fall put paid to most of my development time last year, some time off work this January allowed me time to work on gratia ???? again. I released 0.5.0 to CRAN in part to fix an issue with tests not running ...

An issue that often crops up when modelling with generlaized additive models (GAMs), especially with time series or spatial data, is how to extrapolate beyond the range of the data used to train the model? The issue arises because GAMs use splines to learn from the data using basis functions. ...

After a slight snafu related to the 1.0.0 release of dplyr, a new version of gratia is out and available on CRAN. This release brings a number of new features, including differences of smooths, partial residuals on partial plots of univariate smooths, and a number of utility functions, while under the ...

One of the fun bits of my job is that I have actual time dedicated to helping colleagues and grad students with statistical or computational problems. Recently I’ve been helping one of our Lab Instructors with some data that from their Plant Physiology Lab course. Whilst I was writing ...

Whenever I’m developing R code or writing data wrangling or analysis scripts for research projects that I work on I use Emacs and its add-on package Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS). I’ve done so for nigh on a couple of decades now, ever since I switched full time to ...

You've estimated a GLM or a related model (GLMM, GAM, etc.) for your latest paper and, like a good researcher, you want to visualise the model and show the uncertainty in it. In general this is done using confidence intervals with typically 95% converage. If you remember a little bit of ...

I use generalized additive models (GAMs) in my research work. I use them a lot! Simon Wood’s mgcv package is an excellent set of software for specifying, fitting, and visualizing GAMs for very large data sets. Despite recently dabbling with brms, mgcv is still my go-to GAM package. The ...

Regular readers will know that I have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with GAMs and the mgcv package. I use these models all the time in my research but recently we’ve been hitting the limits of the range of models that mgcv can fit. So I’ve been looking into ...

In a previous post I looked at an approach for computing the differences between smooths estimated as part of a factor-smooth interaction using s()’s by argument. When a common-or-garden factor variable is passed to by, gam() estimates a separate smooth for each level of the by factor. Using the (...

One of the specialist smoother types in the mgcv package is the Markov Random Field (MRF) smooth. This smoother essentially allows you to model spatial data with an intrinsic Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF). GRMFs are often used for spatial data measured over discrete spatial regions. MRFs are quite flexible ...

One of the really appealing features of the mgcv package for fitting GAMs is the functionality it exposes for fitting quite complex models, models that lie well beyond what many of us may have learned about what GAMs can do. One of those features that I use a lot is ...

A couple of days ago, Mollie Brooks and coauthors posted a preprint on BioRχiv illustrating the use of the glmmTMB R package for fitting zero-inflated GLMMs (Brooks et al., 2017). In the paper, glmmTMB is compared with several other GLMM-fitting packages. mgcv has recently gained the ability to fit a ...