[R] package for repeated measures ANOVA with various link functions

[Douglas Bates]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:52 AM, John Sorkin
<jsorkin at grecc.umaryland.edu> wrote:
> R 2.6.0
>  Windows XP

>  At the risk of raising the ire of the R gods . . .
>  I am looking for a package that will allow me to perform a poisson, quasipoisson, or negative binomial regression with adjustment for repeated measures. I have looked at glm, it does not appear to allow repeated measures. Although I can't get any help for lme or lme4 I remember that those packages perform repeated measures using random effects, not repeated measures ANOVA which is what I am looking for. (By the why, how can I get help for lme4? I have tried ?lme4, help.search("lme4") etc. to no avail.)
>  A suggestion for a package that will allow for repeated measures ANOVA in the context of various link functions would be appreciated.

I think you would need to be more specific about the model than just
saying "repeated measures ANOVA".  To me, "repeated measures"
describes a structure in the data.  There are many ways that one could
model the effects of the repeated measures; some might make sense in
the context of your data and some might not.  Without further details
about how you want to model the effect of the repeated measurements it
would be difficult to say if you could use the lmer function in the
lme4 package to do so.

The purpose of the S language and the R implementation of that
language is to facilitate exploration of data, including the fitting
of models that may be appropriate - always keeping in mind George
Box's famous statement that, "All models are wrong, but some models
are useful".  The "one size fits all" approach to data analysis - also
known as "give me a quart and a half of statistics and just make sure
that there is a p-value less than 5% somewhere in there" - doesn't fit
well into the R system.