R help - Jan 2006 - another question about lmer, this time involving coef()

I'm having another problem with lmer(), this time something simpler (I 
think) involving the coef() function for a model with varying 
coefficients.  Here's the R code.  It's a simple model with 2 
observations per group and 10 groups:

# set up the predictors

n.groups <- 10
n.reps <- 2
n <- n.groups*n.reps
group.id <- rep (1:n.groups, each=n.reps)

# simulate the varying parameters

a.group <- rnorm (n.groups, 1, 2)

# simulate the data and print to check that i did it right

y <- rnorm (n, a.group[group.id], 1)
print (cbind (y, group.id))

# fit and summarize the model

fit.1 <- lmer (y ~ 1 + (1 | group.id))
summary (fit.1)

# coef() doesn't work!
coef (fit.1)

--

The following error message came:

Error in "rownames<-"(x, value) : attempt to set rownames on object
with
no dimensions

--

So I went into the code and the coefficient info is there.  There just 
seems to be some "bookkeeping problem" within coef().  I could kludge 
something but I'd rather work within the existing structures and use 
coef() which seems intended for this purpose.

OK, then I tried adding a predictor and it worked fine:

x <- rnorm (n)
fit.2 <- lmer (y ~ 1 + x + (1 | group.id))
summary (fit.2)
coef (fit.2)

--

Am I doing something stupid here or is it actually a (minor) bug?

Thanks
Andrew


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Andrew Gelman
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Andrew Gelman <gelman at stat.columbia.edu> writes:
> Error in "rownames<-"(x, value) : attempt to set rownames on
object with
> no dimensions
....
> Am I doing something stupid here or is it actually a (minor) bug?
The latter. There's a drop=FALSE missing in the coef() method,
specifically in the line

   val <- lapply(ref, function(x) fef[rep(1, nrow(x)), ])

which should read

   val <- lapply(ref, function(x) fef[rep(1, nrow(x)), , drop=FALSE])


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