Solved – How to test for overdispersion in Poisson GLMM with lmer() in R

glmmlme4-nlmeoverdispersionpoisson distributionr

I have the following model:

> model1<-lmer(aph.remain~sMFS1+sAG1+sSHDI1+sbare+season+crop
  +(1|landscape),family=poisson)

…and this is the summary output. 

> summary(model1)
Generalized linear mixed model fit by the Laplace approximation 
Formula: aph.remain ~ sMFS1 + sAG1 + sSHDI1 + sbare + season + crop 
         +      (1 | landscape) 
  AIC  BIC logLik deviance
 4057 4088  -2019     4039
Random effects:
 Groups    Name        Variance Std.Dev.
 landscape (Intercept) 0.74976  0.86588 
Number of obs: 239, groups: landscape, 45

Fixed effects:
              Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
(Intercept)  2.6613761  0.1344630  19.793  < 2e-16 
sMFS1        0.3085978  0.1788322   1.726  0.08441   
sAG1         0.0003141  0.1677138   0.002  0.99851    
sSHDI1       0.4641420  0.1619018   2.867  0.00415 
sbare        0.4133425  0.0297325  13.902  < 2e-16 
seasonlate  -0.5017022  0.0272817 -18.390  < 2e-16 
cropforage   0.7897194  0.0672069  11.751  < 2e-16
cropsoy      0.7661506  0.0491494  15.588  < 2e-16

                  

Correlation of Fixed Effects:
           (Intr) sMFS1  sAG1   sSHDI1 sbare  sesnlt crpfrg
sMFS1      -0.007                                          
sAG1        0.002 -0.631                                   
sSHDI1      0.000  0.593 -0.405                            
sbare      -0.118 -0.003  0.007 -0.013                     
seasonlate -0.036  0.006 -0.006  0.003 -0.283              
cropforage -0.168 -0.004  0.016 -0.014  0.791 -0.231       
cropsoy    -0.182 -0.028  0.030 -0.001  0.404 -0.164  0.557

It is probably overdispersed, but how exactly do I calculate this?

Thanks very much.

Best Answer

Among many other useful tidbits on GLMM with lmer() and other GLMM fitting software, check out the section on the following web page called How can I deal with overdispersion in GLMMs?

http://glmm.wikidot.com/faq

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