corrFamily definition
Tentative formal rules for definition of corrFamily descriptors (work in progress). This is likely to repeat and extend information partially given in corrFamily
and corrFamily-design
documentations.
tpar: Should always be present. For trivial parameterless cases (e.g. ranGCA
), it should be numeric(0L)
, not NULL
.
Cf: function; should always be present. For trivial uncorrelated random effects (e.g. ranGCA
, where only the Af
function carries the information for the model), it should return an identity matrix, not NULL
,
with row names to be matched to the column names of the Z matrix for the random effect.
calc_moreargs: optional function. If present, it should have formal arguments including at least corrfamily
and .
Af: function; optional. If present, it should have row names to be matched to the column names of the Z matrix for the random effect, and also needs column names if it is to be matched with the row names of a correlation matrix (or its inverse).
initialize: Optional function. If present, should have formal arguments including at least Zmatrix
and .
In predefined corrFamily constructors, variables created by `initialize` for use by `Cf` or `Af` should be declared (typically as `NULL`) in the body of the constructor, so that R CMD check does not complain.
public: An environment. initialize
may write into it. It might also read into it, for example read the result of a long previous computation by initialize
during a previous fit, though this opens the door to various errors.