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Record W4410331985 · doi:10.1080/00949655.2025.2502547

Comparison of computationally efficient approximate methods for nonlinear and generalized linear mixed effects models

2025· article· en· W4410331985 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Statistical Computation and Simulation · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMathematics
TopicStatistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
KeywordsMathematicsGeneralized linear mixed modelApplied mathematicsGeneralized linear modelNonlinear systemMixed modelMathematical optimizationStatistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) and nonlinear mixed effects (NLME) models are popular in the analysis of longitudinal or clustered data. Statistical inference is typically based on likelihood methods. When the number of random effects in the models is large, the observed-data likelihood function involves high-dimensional and intractable integration, as these models are nonlinear in the (unobserved) random effects. ‘Exact’ methods, such as Monte Carlo EM (MCEM) algorithms and numerical integration methods, can be computationally very intensive and may offer convergence issues. Computationally more efficient approximate methods, such as the stochastic approximation EM (SAEM) algorithm, linearization methods, or Laplace approximation methods, are therefore commonly used in practice. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive simulation study to evaluate and compare commonly used approximate methods based on three popular R packages in their current versions. Each method has its own advantages and limitations. While the performance of a method may depend on its implementation and the software version, the simulation results may still provide some useful guidelines for data analysts.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.325
Threshold uncertainty score0.452

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.500
Teacher spread0.407 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it