# which model with count data and 3 factors, problem with glm

This is for a study for the abundance of counted individuals of the taxon Nematocera (gnats) in dependence of the three factors "Betrieb"(two levels), "Standort" (8 levels) and "Variante" (3 levels). I have 6 replicates for each markedness. First I tried it with glm poisson.

-> glm(log(Nematocera+1) ~ Betrieb+Standort+Variante, poisson)


but there are 50+ warnings in R:

In dpois(y, mu, log = TRUE) : non-integer x = 5.613128

what does that mean? I do have count data, does the transformation change this in some way? And what can I do against this? My output isn't good anyway:

Deviance Residuals:
Min        1Q    Median        3Q       Max
-0.63233  -0.21529  -0.01273   0.20194   0.75027

Coefficients: (1 not defined because of singularities)

Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept)  1.9187905  0.1014629  18.911   <2e-16 ***
Betrieb2    -0.1125782  0.1318159  -0.854    0.393
Standort2    0.0003384  0.1280454   0.003    0.998
Standort3    0.0333526  0.1270018   0.263    0.793
Standort4   -0.0434195  0.1294691  -0.335    0.737
Standort5    0.0941010  0.1323946   0.711    0.477
Standort6    0.0973171  0.1322933   0.736    0.462
Standort7    0.0182000  0.1348590   0.135    0.893
Standort8           NA         NA      NA       NA
Variante2    0.0618031  0.0781974   0.790    0.429
Variante3   -0.0834252  0.0811046  -1.029    0.304


Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

(Dispersion parameter for poisson family taken to be 1)

Null deviance: 18.177  on 143  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 12.840  on 134  degrees of freedom
AIC: Inf

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4


Means singularities, that there are not enough replicates for the three factors? And one level was completely ignored by R... and I'm shure, there are significances. But the model-critiqeu looks good.

After this i tried a linear model, where the warnings do not occur anymore, but the output is nearly the same. Besides the lm should not be used for count data. Am I right?

At least I tried the glm for the several factors:

glm(log(Nematocera+1) ~Betrieb, family = poisson)


with the same warnings, but no singularities.

I really don't know which model to use. I'm sorry for the novice approach, but I never really understood statistics. It would be very nice, if someone could help me, please.

• In addition to the answer: You should use a Generalized Linear Mixed Model here. You don't explain what your factors mean, but (taking into account that "Standort" means "site") it looks like at least Standort should be modeled as a random effect. Your model is likely to be over-parameterized if you include Standort as a fixed effect. – Roland Mar 7 '16 at 9:21
• Ok, i never used the Generalized Linear Mixed Model before. And yes, "Standort" means site, "Betrieb" could be described with region and "Variante" with land use. Thank you, i'll try the GLMM! – Angelica M. Mar 8 '16 at 15:57
• Maybe you can tell me how this would look like in R? I will have to get the lme4 - package. And then 'glmer(Nematocera ~ Betrieb + Variante + (1|Standort), family = "poisson")'. I found no good example on this... – Angelica M. Mar 20 '16 at 16:02

glm(Nematocera ~ Betrieb+Standort+Variante, poisson)