[R] Performing gage R&R study in R w/more than 2 factors

[Matt Jacob]

Hi everyone,

I'm fairly new to R, and I don't have a background in statistics, so
please bear with me. ;-)

I'm dealing with 2^k factorial designs, and I was just wondering if
there's any way to analyze more than two factors of a gage R&R study in
R. For example, Minitab has an "expanded gage R&R" function that lets
you include up to eight additional factors besides the usual two that
are present in gage studies (parts and operators). If I wanted to
include n additional random factors, is there a package or built-in
functionality that will allow me to do that?

I've been experimenting with the SixSigma package, and that has a ss.rr
method which works great---as long as your experiment only contains two
factors. I've also been using lmer from lme4 to fit a linear model of my
experiment, but the standard deviations generated by lmer don't match
what I'm seeing in Minitab. Since all my factors are random, the formula
I'm using looks like this:

vals ~ 1 + (1|f1) + (1|f2) + (1|f3) + (1|f1:f2) + (1|f1:f3) + (1|f2:f3)

What am I doing wrong, and how can I fix it?

Thanks,

Matt