[ADMB Users] function maximizer failed (couldn't find STD file)??

[Shawn McCracken]

Dear glmmADMB users,

Yesterday I was running my full & reduced models with several different distribution families and had no problems except for the warning message "Estimated covariance matrix may not be positive definite" followed by a string of numbers for a few of the distribution famlies. But when I ran the summary() command on the model everything seemed fine. I decided I would update to the latest version of glmmADMB to see what happens. Ran the same models and the warning was gone. Great! I was on Mac OSX 10.6.8, running R v.2.14.0 64-bit, and package glmmADMB v.0.6.5 and updated to glmmADMB v.0.7.2.5. I ran the following distributions: poisson, zero-inflated poisson, negative binomial, zero-inflated negative binomial, and negative binomial type 1. Today I come back to continue working on reduced models and I get the following error: 

Error in glmmadmb(count ~ treat + bromleaf + (1 | tree), data = ecpad,  : 

  The function maximizer failed (couldn't find STD file)

In addition: Warning message:

running command './glmmadmb -maxfn 500 -maxph 5 -noinit -shess' had status 1 

I have now gone through restarting everything, downgrading glmmADMB to v.0.7.2.4 then back to v.0.7.2.5, and upgraded R to v.2.14.1 with no luck. I looked for glmmADMB version 0.6.5 but couldn't find it. Just some preliminary testing with models that ran fine yesterday it appears that negative binomial (family="nbinom") and negative binomial type 1 (family="nbinom1") are the two that now give the above error. It is strange that zero-inflated negative binomial works fine. I have tried to follow the previous few posts about dealing with this problem but with no luch and its a little unclear to me if they were on a Mac or not for some of those remedies.

Really loving all the new functionality of glmmADMB so big thanks to the developers. Just bummed its not working for me now, particularly negative binomial type 1.

Where can I get the glmmADMB v. 0.6.5 that was working?

Thank you,

Shawn

[Ben Bolker]

A couple of thoughts:

* with a little bit of work I can retrieve the relevant version from
the source code repository, build it, and put it up somewhere. In the
meantime you could go to
http://www.math.mcmaster.ca/~bolker/R/src/contrib/ to download version
0.7 (then put it somewhere, setwd() to the appropriate directory, and
install.packages("glmmADMB_0.7.tar.gz",repos=NULL,type="source"))
* a lot of the recent changes in ADMB have to do with tweaks to the TPL
(model definition) file and to ADMB itself that are _supposed_ to make
things more stable in general, but *may* tip a marginally stable model
over the line to unstable -- think of it as a perturbation in a
generally good direction but with some random component ...
* try running with admb.opts=admbControl(shess=FALSE,noinit=FALSE) and
see if that helps at all ...

Ben Bolker

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[Shawn McCracken]

Hello Ben,

First I tried:

> mm7b=glmmadmb(count~treat+bronum+bromelv+bromhgt+bromleaf+bromh2o+h2opH+(1|tree),data=ecpad,admb.opts=admbControl(shess=FALSE,noinit=FALSE),family="nbinom")

and still got:

Error in glmmadmb(count ~ treat + bronum + bromelv + bromhgt + bromleaf +  : 

  The function maximizer failed (couldn't find STD file)

In addition: Warning message:

running command './glmmadmb -maxfn 500 -maxph 5' had status 1 

Went down to v.0.7 and all seems well again. Thank you so much! It made for a stressful day up to this point.

Thanks again,

Shawn 

--

Shawn F. McCracken
Ph.D. Candidate - Aquatic Resources
Department of Biology
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, Texas 78666
 
smccr...@txstate.edu
http://uweb.txstate.edu/~sm1216/
_________________________________
 
Executive Director/Research Coordinator
The TADPOLE Organization
 
smccr...@tadpoleorg.org
www.tadpoleorg.org

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