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I have a set of count data, which look something like this:

    Count   Count.type   Site
    299     A            A   
    325     A            A       
    192     A            A       
    180     B            A       
    304     B            A       
    332     B            A       
    2919    A            B       
    2014    A            B       
    2220    A            B       
    1967    B            B       
    1799    B            B       
    2001    B            B       

... and so on. There are only two levels of Count.type, and about ten Sites.

I'd like to fit a model similar to:

glmmPQL(Count ~ Count.type, random = ~ 1 | Site, family="poisson")

My problem is that the dispersion of counts is dramatically higher for one level of Count.type than for the other. I have tried to find a negative binomial or quasipoisson approach, but in the examples I can find (e.g., here How does glm.nb work?), a single theta is estimated and used on all groups.

Does anyone know of a solution that would estimate (or allow me to manually specify) different dispersion parameters for the two groups in Count.type, that is robust for count data?

kjetil b halvorsen
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bshane
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  • In what sense does the dispersion differ by group? The variance is supposed to vary by mean? How did you determine that the dispersion varies problematically? – gung - Reinstate Monica Mar 04 '15 at 16:20
  • Variance differs by Count.type very clearly (in the residuals of the glmmPQL model, the sd is about an order of magnitude greater for type B than type A, and that contrast is highly significant on a Levene's test). Variance correlates with mean for Count.type B, but not (so far as I can tell) for Count.type A. I'm not sure if there is a formal test for this being 'likely to be problematic', but the difference in variance is huge and the sample sizes are fairly small, so I can't imagine it *not* being a problem. – bshane Mar 05 '15 at 01:25
  • I would look into what is possible with gamlss – kjetil b halvorsen Aug 01 '17 at 22:19

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