The statistical model:

\(y_t = \beta_0 + \beta_1 * (Elevation_s)_t + \beta_2 * Slope_t + (b_s)_t + \epsilon_t\)

Where:

• \(\beta_0\) is the mean response when both Elevation and Slope are 0
• \(\beta_1\) is the change in mean response for a 1-unit change in elevation. Elevation is measured at the stand level, so all plots in a stand share a single value in elevation.
• \(\beta_2\) is the change in mean response for a 1-unit change in slope. Slope is measured at the plot level, so every plot potentially has a unique value of slope.

Let’s define the parameters:

• the intercept \((\beta_0)\) will be -1
• the coefficient for elevation \((\beta_1)\) will be set to 0.005
• the coefficient for slope \((\beta_2)\) will be set to 0.1

nstand = 5
nplot = 4
b0 = -1
b1 = .005
b2 = .1
sds = 2
sd = 1

Simulate other variables:

set.seed(16)
stand = rep(LETTERS[1:nstand], each = nplot)
standeff = rep( rnorm(nstand, 0, sds), each = nplot)
ploteff = rnorm(nstand*nplot, 0, sd)

Simulate elevation and slope:

elevation = rep( runif(nstand, 1000, 1500), each = nplot)
slope = runif(nstand*nplot, 2, 75)

Simulate response variable:

resp2 = b0 + b1*elevation + b2*slope + standeff + ploteff 

Your tasks (complete each task in its’ own code chunk, make sure to use echo=TRUE so I can see your code):

1. Fit a linear mixed model with the response variable as a function of elevation and slope with stand as a random effect. Are the estimated parameters similar to the intial parameters as we defined them?

library(lme4)

## Loading required package: Matrix

library(Matrix)
fit1 <- lmer(resp2 ~ 1 + elevation + slope + (1|stand))
fit1

## Linear mixed model fit by REML ['lmerMod']
## Formula: resp2 ~ 1 + elevation + slope + (1 | stand)
## REML criterion at convergence: 81.9874
## Random effects:
##  Groups   Name        Std.Dev.
##  stand    (Intercept) 1.099   
##  Residual             1.165   
## Number of obs: 20, groups:  stand, 5
## Fixed Effects:
## (Intercept)    elevation        slope  
##   -21.31463      0.02060      0.09511

Compared to initial parameters: b0 = -1, b1 = .005, b2 = .1 and extimated parameters we have are: b0 = -21.314628, b1 = 0.020600, b2 = 0.095105, b2 is similar but b0 and b1 are different.

2. Create a function for your model and run 1000 simulations of that model.

sim_fun <- function(nstand = 5, nplot = 4, b0 = -1, b1 = 0.005, b2 = 0.1, sds = 2, sd = 1) {
  stand <- rep(LETTERS[1:nstand], each = nplot)
  standeff <- rep(rnorm(nstand, 0, sds), each = nplot)
  ploteff <- rnorm(nstand * nplot, 0, sd)
  elevation <- rep(runif(nstand, 1000, 1500), each = nplot)
  slope <- runif(nstand * nplot, 2, 75)
  resp2 <- b0 + b1 * elevation + b2 * slope + standeff + ploteff
  
  dat <- data.frame(resp2, elevation, slope, stand)
  lmer(resp2 ~ 1 + elevation + slope + (1|stand), data = dat)
}
sim_fun()

## Linear mixed model fit by REML ['lmerMod']
## Formula: resp2 ~ 1 + elevation + slope + (1 | stand)
##    Data: dat
## REML criterion at convergence: 80.9781
## Random effects:
##  Groups   Name        Std.Dev.
##  stand    (Intercept) 2.3573  
##  Residual             0.9754  
## Number of obs: 20, groups:  stand, 5
## Fixed Effects:
## (Intercept)    elevation        slope  
##   10.584601    -0.005464     0.086839

library(purrr)
sim_model <- rerun(1000, sim_fun())

## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00350336
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.0045514
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00363544
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00439561
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00239513
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00219495
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular
## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00322495
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## boundary (singular) fit: see ?isSingular

3. Extract the stand and residual variances from this simulation run. Print the first 6 rows of the data.

library(dplyr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

library(broom)
variances <- sim_model %>% map_dfr(tidy, effects = "ran_pars", scales = "vcov")
variances[1:6,]

4. Choose three different sample sizes (your choice) and run 1000 model simulations with each sample size. Create 3 visualizations that compare distributions of the variances for each of the 3 sample sizes. Make sure that the axes are labelled correctly. What do these graphs say about the relationship between sample size and variance?

library(ggplot2)

## Registered S3 methods overwritten by 'ggplot2':
##   method         from 
##   [.quosures     rlang
##   c.quosures     rlang
##   print.quosures rlang

stand_sims <- c(50, 100, 150) %>%
  set_names() %>%
  map(~replicate(1000, sim_fun(nstand = .x)))

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.0021739
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.0129268
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00210547
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

## Warning in checkConv(attr(opt, "derivs"), opt$par, ctrl =
## control$checkConv, : Model failed to converge with max|grad| = 0.00257168
## (tol = 0.002, component 1)

vars <- stand_sims %>%
  modify_depth(2, ~tidy(.x, effects = "ran_pars", scales = "vcov")) %>%
  map_dfr(bind_rows, .id = "id") %>%
  filter(group == "stand")

library(labeling)

ggplot(vars, aes(x = estimate)) +
     geom_density(fill = "pink", alpha = .25) +
     facet_wrap(~id) +
     geom_vline(xintercept = 4)

5. Plot the coefficients of the estimates of elevation and slope. Hint: the x-axis should have 1000 values. Discuss the graphs.

library(furrr)

## Loading required package: future

coeffest <- sim_model %>% 
  future_map(tidy, effects = "fixed") %>% 
  bind_rows()

coeffest %>% 
  dplyr::filter(term %in% c("elevation", "slope")) %>% 
  group_by(term) %>% 
  mutate(x = 1 : 1000) %>%
  ungroup() %>% 
  mutate(real_value = ifelse(term == "elevation", 0.005, 0.1)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = x, y = estimate)) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_wrap(~term) +
  geom_hline(aes(yintercept = real_value, color = term), linetype = 3, size = 2) +
  labs(x="1000-value estimation", y="mean value")

After running simulation model with large amount of times, the mean value of elevation and slop are very close to the initial parameters.

6. Submit a link to this document in R Pubs to your Moodle.