[R-lang] Re: "Zero" problem with lmer

[T. Florian Jaeger]

I agree with Daniel. You could just do a Fisher exact, for example. But you
don't really need a test for the classifier data set. For the other data
set, you cannot say anything about an interaction, because you don't have
enough "handling" cases to detect an interaction (with or without adjustment
for subject clusters).

Florian

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 4:01 AM, Daniel Ezra Johnson <
danielezrajohnson@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think sometimes we get carried away with our wonderful tools like lmer().
>
> > , , Construction = Classifier
> >
> >           Agent
> > Handshape  agent no_agent
> >   handling    36        1 (added)
> >   object      27       65
> >
> > , , Construction = Lexical_item
> >
> >           Agent
> > Handshape  agent no_agent
> >   handling     1        1 (added)
> >   object      45       54
>
> For this data:
>
> a) in the Classifier construction, it is very clear that Agent favors
> Handling, compared to No Agent
>
> b) in the Lexical Item construction, there is no evidence of an effect
> of Agent/No Agent on Handshape (because Handshape is largely or
> totally invariant*)
>
> You can call this an interaction between Agent and Classifier, if you
> wanted...
>
> *Are all three 1's "added" or is one of them real?
>
> Either way, you're very close to a situation where Handling only
> occurs in one of the four cells, only in Classifier/Agent.
>
> I don't think an extreme distribution like that lends itself to (aka
> needs) ordinary quantitative regression analysis (and it's also not
> clear how there _could be_ a Subject effect).
>
> Just my two cents,
> Daniel
>
>
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