LLMM – local linear mixed models

The generality of Mixed Models(Linear or NonLinear) is well known and has found extensive use in just about every applied research setting in the Social Sciences, Medicine, Engineering and GIS applications. Variations of these methods have been implemented in most major statistical packages. A recent article in Journal of Agricultrural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics( Sept. 2007) by Heegaard and Nilsen discuss theory and application in a biological spatial setting. LLMM models can be thought of as complementary to GAMM models but with additional user control of the fixed and stochastic structures for purposes of spatial smoothing. An implementation of LLMM as a contributed R package can be found at: http://eecrg.uib.no/personal_pages/LLMM.htm