General Correlation Structure

DESCRIPTION:

This function is a constructor for the corSymm class, representing a general correlation structure. The internal representation of this structure, in terms of unconstrained parameters, uses the spherical parametrization defined in Pinheiro and Bates (1996). Objects created using this constructor must be later initialized using the appropriate initialize method.

USAGE:

corSymm(value, form, fixed) 

OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS:

value
an optional vector with the parameter values. Default is numeric(0), which results in a vector of zeros of appropriate dimension being assigned to the parameters when object is initialized (corresponding to an identity correlation structure).
form
a one sided formula of the form `~ t', or `~ t | g', specifying a time covariate t and, optionally, a grouping factor g. A covariate for this correlation structure must consist of consecutive integers starting at 1. When a grouping factor is present in form, the correlation structure is assumed to apply only to observations within the same grouping level; observations with different grouping levels are assumed to be uncorrelated. Defaults to `~ 1', which corresponds to using the order of the observations in the data as a covariate, and no groups.
fixed
an optional logical value indicating whether the coefficients should be allowed to vary in the optimization, or kept fixed at their initial value. Defaults to FALSE, in which case the coefficients are allowed to vary.

VALUE:

an object of class corSymm representing a general correlation structure.

REFERENCES:

Pinheiro, J.C. and Bates., D.M. (1996) "Unconstrained Parametrizations for Variance-Covariance Matrices", Statistics and Computing, 6, 289-296.

SEE ALSO:

EXAMPLES:

## covariate is observation order and grouping factor is Subject 
cs1 <- corSymm(form = ~ 1 | Subject)