Comparing levels of factors after a GLM in R

Question

Here is a little background about my situation: my data refer to the number of prey successfully eaten by a predator. As the number of prey is limited (25 available) in each trial, I had a column "Sample" representing the number of available prey (so, 25 in each trial), and another called "Count" which was the number of success (how many prey were eaten). I based my analysis on the example from the R book on proportion data (page 578). The explanatory variables are Temperature (4 levels, which I treated as factor), and Sex of the predator (obviously, male or female). So I end up with this model:

model <- glm(y ~ Temperature+Sex+Temperature*Sex, 
          data=predator, family=quasibinomial) 

After getting the Analysis of Deviance table, it turns out that Temperature and Sex (but not the interaction) have a significant effect on the consumption of prey. Now, my problem: I need to know which temperatures differ, i.e., I have to compare the 4 temperatures to each other. If I had a linear model, I would use the TukeyHSD function, but as I am using a GLM I can't. I have been looking through the package MASS and trying to set up a contrast matrix but for some reason it doesn't work. Any suggestions or references?

Here's the summary I get from my model, if that helps making it clearer ...

y <- cbind(data$Count, data$Sample-data$Count)
model <- glm(y ~ Temperature+Sex+Temperature*Sex, 
             data=predator, family=quasibinomial) 
> summary(model)

# Call:
# glm(formula = y ~ Temperature + Sex + Temperature * Sex, 
       family=quasibinomial, data=data)

# Deviance Residuals: 
#     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  
# -3.7926  -1.4308  -0.3098   0.9438   3.6831  
    
# Coefficients:
#                                        Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
# (Intercept)                             -1.6094     0.2672  -6.024 3.86e-08 ***
# Temperature8                             0.3438     0.3594   0.957   0.3414    
# Temperature11                           -1.0296     0.4803  -2.144   0.0348 *  
# Temperature15                           -1.2669     0.5174  -2.449   0.0163 *  
# SexMale                                    0.3822     0.3577   1.069   0.2882    
# Temperature8:SexMale                    -0.2152     0.4884  -0.441   0.6606    
# Temperature11:SexMale                    0.4136     0.6093   0.679   0.4990    
# Temperature15:SexMale                    0.4370     0.6503   0.672   0.5033    
# ---
# Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1 
    
# (Dispersion parameter for quasibinomial family taken to be 2.97372)    
#     Null deviance: 384.54  on 95  degrees of freedom
# Residual deviance: 289.45  on 88  degrees of freedom
# AIC: NA   
# Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5

Answer 1

Anne, I will shorty explain how to do such multiple comparisons in general. Why this doesn't work in your specific case, I don't know; I'm sorry.

But normally, you can do it with the multcomp package and the function glht. Here is an example:

mydata      <- read.csv("https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stat/data/binary.csv")
mydata$rank <- factor(mydata$rank)
my.mod      <- glm(admit~gre+gpa*rank, data=mydata, family=quasibinomial)

summary(my.mod)
# 
# Coefficients:
#              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)  
# (Intercept) -4.985768   2.498395  -1.996   0.0467 *
# gre          0.002287   0.001110   2.060   0.0400 *
# gpa          1.089088   0.731319   1.489   0.1372  
# rank2        0.503294   2.982966   0.169   0.8661  
# rank3        0.450796   3.266665   0.138   0.8903  
# rank4       -1.508472   4.202000  -0.359   0.7198  
# gpa:rank2   -0.342951   0.864575  -0.397   0.6918  
# gpa:rank3   -0.515245   0.935922  -0.551   0.5823  
# gpa:rank4   -0.009246   1.220757  -0.008   0.9940  
# ---
# Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

If you wanted to calculate the pairwise comparisons between rank using Tukey's HSD, you could do that in this way:

library(multcomp)
summary(glht(my.mod, mcp(rank="Tukey")))
# 
#    Simultaneous Tests for General Linear Hypotheses
# 
# Multiple Comparisons of Means: Tukey Contrasts
# 
# Fit: glm(formula = admit ~ gre + gpa * rank, family = quasibinomial, data = mydata)   
# 
# Linear Hypotheses:
#            Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
# 2 - 1 == 0   0.5033     2.9830   0.169    0.998
# 3 - 1 == 0   0.4508     3.2667   0.138    0.999
# 4 - 1 == 0  -1.5085     4.2020  -0.359    0.984
# 3 - 2 == 0  -0.0525     2.6880  -0.020    1.000
# 4 - 2 == 0  -2.0118     3.7540  -0.536    0.949
# 4 - 3 == 0  -1.9593     3.9972  -0.490    0.960
# (Adjusted p values reported -- single-step method)
# 
# Warning message:
# In mcp2matrix(model, linfct = linfct) :
#   covariate interactions found -- default contrast might be inappropriate

All pairwise comparisons are given together with a $p$-value. Warning: These comparisons only concern the main effects. The interactions are ignored. If interactions are present, a warning will be given (as in the output above). For a more extensive tutorial on how to proceed when interactions are present, see these additional multcomp examples.

Note: As @gung noted in the comments, you should - whenever possible - include temperature as a continuous rather than a categorical variable. Concerning the interaction: you could perform a likelihood ratio test to check whether the interaction term significantly improves the model fit. In your case, the code would look something like that:

# Original model
model <- glm(y ~ Temperature+Sex+Temperature*Sex, data=predator, family=quasibinomial) 

# Model without an interaction
model2 <- glm(y ~ Temperature+Sex data=predator, family=quasibinomial) 

# Likelihood ratio test
anova(model, model2, test="LRT")

If this test is not significant, you may remove the interaction from your model. Maybe glht will work then?