Empirical Likelihood-Based Analysis of Variance Component in Linear Mixed-Effects Models

• Activity Number: 87 - Survival and Longitudinal/Clustered Data Analysis
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 9, 2021 : 10:00 AM to 11:50 AM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Jingru Zhang* and Haochang Shou and Hongzhe Li
• Companies: University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania
• Keywords: Boundary value; Global test; Heritability analysis; Local test; Non-parametric test; Wearable device data

Abstract

Linear mixed-effects models are widely used in analyzing repeated measurement and longitudinal data, where the inferences of both fixed-effects and variance components are of importance. Although statistical inference of the fixed effects is well studied, inference of the variance component is rarely explored, which often requires strong distributional assumptions on the random effects and errors. In this paper, we develop empirical likelihood-based methods for the inference of variance components in the presence of fixed effects. A non-parametric version of the Wilks' theorem for the proposed statistics is derived. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed methods exhibit better coverage than the commonly used likelihood ratio method with Gaussian assumption and the results with unknown fixed effects are as good as those with known fixed effects. The new tests are illustrated in the analysis of a wearable device dataset.