[R] optimize a joint lieklihood with mle2

[Benedikt Gehr, Institut für Evolutionsbiologie und Umweltwissenschaften]

Hi

I'm trying to maximize a joint likelihood of 2 likelihoods (Likelihood 1 and 
Likelihood 2) in mle2, where the parameters I estimate in Likelihood 2 go 
into the likelihood 1. In Likelihood 1 I estimate the vector logN with 
length 37, and for the Likelihood 2 I measure a vector s of length 8.
The values of s in Lieklihood 2 are used in the Likelihood 1.

I have 2 questions:

##1
I manage to write the joint lieklihood (it's very long which is why I don't 
put it here), but I don't know how to write the correct argument for the 
mle2 function. Here is what I've tried:

##################################
the lieklihood function to be optimized is called mfun(logN, s, h=h, 
cohort=cohort). I want to maximize the vectors logN and s. I define the 
starting values for logN as svec1 and for s as svec2

then I write for the optimization:

m1 = mle2(mfun,start=list(svec1=logN,svec2=s),
   method="L-BFGS-B",lower=lower,upper=10,		
   vecpar=TRUE,
   data=list(h=h,cohort=cohort))

but I get the error:
Error in mle2(mfun, start = list(svec1 = logN, svec2 = s), method = 
"L-BFGS-B",  :
   some named arguments in 'start' are not arguments to the specified 
log-likelihood function

How can I correctly write the fucntion for this?

#####################################################

##2
Besides I'm using constrained optim method L-BFGS-B. But I would only like 
to use it for logN and not for s. Is that at all possible? I guess I could 
use the same limits also for s because s falls in the range of logN values, 
but how can I tell mle2 that I measure 2 likelihoods.

thanks so much for the help

Benedikt