# Illustrative datasets and analysis for multilevel modelling

I recently took an introductory course on multilevel modelling. Most of the datasets and examples we used were from the social sciences. I've just got a 2 week internship in a biostatistics department, where they want me to start a project concerning the variation at hospital level of patient outcomes for an emergency condition that has a high mortality rate, both between hospitals and over a 5 year time span. I'm starting the internship next week, and I was hoping to find a book or online resource where a similar analysis (preferably with R, Stata or MLwiN) has been done, preferably one where they provide their data sets for the reader. Any links would be most welcome.

Edit: I will be working with a dataset detailing all recorded aspects of the patient's in-hospital care. The main outcome of interest is death within 30 days of admission.

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You might want to check out the UCLA multilevel modelling resources.

For example, the UCLA site has

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Are you aware of the online resources at the MLwiN site? In particular their free online course. They go through examples in all three software packages you mention (R, Stata, and MLwiN of course), and provide datasets along with them.

One of the modules goes through multi-level models for binary responses, which it sounds like your project would entail.

Currently our tag wiki has the community suggested readings for multi-level models. Although I couldn't say off-hand which of those books had accompanying data.

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Thanks - I have looked at the bristol.ac.uk course and it was quite helpful. However, at this stage I'm really looking for some analysis of patient & hospital data, and unfortunately all their examples (that I saw) were from the social sciences. –  P Sellaz Dec 12 '11 at 14:16
As for the books in the tag, I have Venables and Ripley (2002) and Gelman & Hill (2006) and haven't found anything there. I also just got Pinheiro & Bates - Mixed Effects Models in S and S-Plus from the library - there are a some pharmacokinetics datasets there, but nothing very close to what I'm looking for. –  P Sellaz Dec 12 '11 at 14:25

Stata comes with a bunch of toy data sets that you can take a look at: File -> Example Data Sets -> Manual datasets -> [XT] -> there appears to be some biostat data under xtmepoisson and xtmixed. There are some examples on GLLAMM website with both code and data: http://gllamm.org/examples.html.

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