Interactions between random effects

Question

I'm considering a mixed-effects model to try to understand factors that influence the number of ticks sampled on wild rodents. My data is nested so that I have one tick count per rodent, multiple rodents per site and multiple sites per year (sites are repeated across years but not every site is present in all years).

So far, without fixed effects, my model looks something like this:

glmer(Ticks~(1|Year)+(1|Site), family=poisson, data=tickdata)

I understand that this will account for random variation between sites and between years. My main concern is that I think the effect of specific sites will change between years, e.g. some sites may recieve more rainfall than others, but the identity of the sites with the highest rainfall differs between years.

So do I need some sort of interaction term? Maybe something like this:

glmer(Ticks~(1|Year)+(1|Site)+(1|Year:Site), family=poisson, data=tickdata) 

Answer 1

Have you tried it? That sounds like it should be fine.

set.seed(101)
## generate fully crossed design:
d <- expand.grid(Year=2000:2010,Site=1:30)
## sample 70% of the site/year comb to induce lack of balance
d <- d[sample(1:nrow(d),size=round(0.7*nrow(d))),]
## now get Poisson-distributed number of obs per site/year
library(plyr)
d <- ddply(d,c("Site","Year"),transform,rep=seq(rpois(1,lambda=10)))
library(lme4)
d$ticks <- simulate(~1+(1|Year)+(1|Site)+(1|Year:Site),
                    family=poisson,newdata=d,
                    newparams=list(beta=2, ## mean(log(ticks))=2
                               theta=c(1,1,1)))[[1]]
mm <- glmer(ticks~1+(1|Year)+(1|Site)+(1|Year:Site),
                    family=poisson,data=d)

We get out approximately what we put in -- equal variances at each level:

## Generalized linear mixed model fit by maximum likelihood (Laplace
##   Approximation) [glmerMod]
##  Family: poisson  ( log )
## Formula: ticks ~ 1 + (1 | Year) + (1 | Site) + (1 | Year:Site)
##    Data: d
## 
##      AIC      BIC   logLik deviance df.resid 
##  12487.3  12510.2  -6239.7  12479.3     2267 
## 
## Scaled residuals: 
##     Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max 
## -2.9944 -0.6842 -0.0726  0.6010  3.8532 
## 
## Random effects:
##  Groups    Name        Variance Std.Dev.
##  Year:Site (Intercept) 1.0818   1.0401  
##  Site      (Intercept) 1.0490   1.0242  
##  Year      (Intercept) 0.9787   0.9893  
## Number of obs: 2271, groups:  Year:Site, 231 Site, 30 Year, 11
## 
## Fixed effects:
##             Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
## (Intercept)   2.1952     0.3593   6.109    1e-09 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

You may want to include an observation-level random effect to allow for overdispersion (see the "grouse ticks" example in http://rpubs.com/bbolker/glmmchapter)