[R] cannot allocate vector

[Douglas Bates]

"Matt Loveland" <loveland.1 at nd.edu> writes:

> I'm having trouble with glmmPQL.
> 
> I'm fitting a 2 level random intercept model, with 90,000 cases and
> about 330 groups.  I'm unable to get any results on the full data
> set.  I can get it to work if I sample down to about 30,000 cases.
> But for models with N's much larger than that I get the following
> warning message:
> 
>  m3=glmmPQL(prepfood~iage+iemployed+iwhite+ieduclevl+imarried+servcomm+leadgrup+leadsty4, family=binomial, random=~1|congrega1,data=data)
> Error: cannot allocate vector of size 4135 Kb
> In addition: Warning message: 
> Reached total allocation of 253Mb: see help(memory.size) 

It may be possible to fit the model on your current machine with the
current setting using function GLMM from package lme4.  This function
by default uses essentially the same algorithm as glmmPQL from MASS
(iteratively weighted calls to lme) but it employs a different version
of lme (glmmPQL calls lme from the nlme package while GLMM calls a
more efficient representation in the lme4 package itself).

Finally, there is yet another implementation of lme in development - a
version that is more economical in storage, more flexible in the model
structures that can be fit (for those who have been waiting, yes it
can fit models with crossed and partially crossed random effects using
a reasonable syntax and data representation), and is fast.  On models
fit to large data sets this version is remarkably fast.

Our schedule is to release new versions of the lme4 and Matrix
packages with R-1.9.0 (2004-04-04).  Please contact me off-list if you
want to participate in testing these packages or if you can provide
data for our testing.

-- 
Douglas Bates                            bates at stat.wisc.edu
Statistics Department                    608/262-2598
University of Wisconsin - Madison        http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/