Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2018 / iii / Paper 218 / 1

The violated assumption is independence of random variables across observations: repeated measurements on the same rat form clustered data. A persistent rat-specific weight difference induces positive within-rat covariance, even after adjustment for time and diet. Treating all 176 measurements as independent is pseudoreplication.

For the claimed lack of identifiability in the second fit, Rat must be a categorical variable, as intended by the rat-effect interpretation. Each rat receives only one diet, so this is confounding of nested fixed factors. If $z_r$ is the rat-indicator column, the diet-$d$ indicator is ${\sum }_{r:D_r=d}{z}_r$. Thus a diet effect can be increased by $c_d$ and every corresponding rat effect decreased by $c_d$, leaving all fitted values unchanged. With an intercept, two diet columns, fifteen rat contrasts and time, there are 19 columns but only 17 independent columns: the intercept and rat contrasts already span the diet columns, while time varies within rats. This gives rank-deficient ordinary least squares.

The first model ignores within-rat dependence; the second cannot separate unrestricted fixed diet and rat effects. If Rat were instead encoded as a single numeric predictor, the asserted rank deficiency would not follow merely from nesting.

Write $r=1,\dots ,16$ for rats and $j$ for repeated observations. With diet 1 as the reference level in a regression factor, the random-intercept linear mixed model iswith the two families of normal distributions independent and the covariates treated as fixed. The reported estimates areThe corresponding estimated standard deviations are $36.577$ and $8.176$ grams. Individual realized random intercepts are not parameters in this marginal model, and their predictions are not supplied by this summary. For distinct measurements on the same rat, $\mathrm{Cov}(Y_{rj},Y_{rk})={\tau }^2$, while the marginal variance is ${\tau }^2+{\sigma }^2$; different rats are independent.

The estimated mean weight rises by $0.58568$ grams per day, adjusting for diet and the rat's random intercept. This common slope is imposed across all diets: there is no time-by-diet interaction term, so these estimates do not compare diet-specific growth slopes. The intercept refers to time zero for diet 1 and a zero rat effect.

Let $Z_{ir}=1_{\{\text{observation }i\text{ belongs to rat }r\}}$. After integrating out the random intercepts,The fixed-effect design matrix has four independent columns, so the given $A$ has dimensions $176\times 172$, with $A^{T}A=I_{172}$ and $A^{T}X=0$. Consequently the error contrasts $U=A^{T}Y$ have a multivariate normal distribution with mean zero and covariance matrix $W=A^{T}VA$.

The restricted likelihood from orthogonal error contrasts is their density. Equivalently, the estimates maximizeThis is restricted maximum likelihood, not maximization over individual rat effects. The unknown $\beta$ disappears because $A^{T}X=0$. Replacing $A$ by $AQ$ for an orthogonal $Q$ rotates $U$ and conjugates $W$, preserving the determinant and quadratic form; hence the objective is independent of the chosen orthonormal basis. The software's integrated REML log-likelihood can differ by an additive constant depending only on $X$, which has no effect on these variance estimates.

There are two defects. The mixed fit supplies a restricted maximum likelihood, whereas the ordinary fit supplies an ordinary log-likelihood, so their difference is not a likelihood-ratio test statistic. Also, $H_0:{\tau }^2=0$ lies on the boundary of ${\tau }^2\ge 0$; the usual Wilks theorem does not give a ${\chi }_1^2$ null law.

A valid approach first refits the mixed model by ordinary maximum likelihood estimation, setting REML to false, and fits the same fixed effects under $H_0$. For $V={\tau }^{2}Z{Z}^T+{\sigma }^{2}I$, maximizeover $\beta ,{\sigma }^2>0,{\tau }^2\ge 0$, and separately over $\beta ,{\sigma }^2>0$ with ${\tau }^2=0$. Set $T=2({\hat{\ell }}_1-{\hat{\ell }}_0)\ge 0$.

For finite-sample calibration, use the location-scale invariant simulation test for a Gaussian variance component. With the actual $X,Z$ fixed, simulate $B$ independent vectors $Y^{(b)}\sim N(0,I_{176})$, refit both models by ordinary maximum likelihood estimation to each, and calculate $T_b$ in exactly the same way. Under $H_0$, $Y=X\beta +\sigma z$. Translating by a vector in the column space of $X$ and multiplying by a positive scalar preserves the statistic: both maximized log-likelihoods acquire the same scale constant. Thus this simulation has the correct null law without knowing $\beta$ or $\sigma$. A conservative Monte Carlo p-value isIn the usual regular limit with increasing independent groups, a variance-component likelihood-ratio test at a boundary instead uses $\frac{1}{2}{\delta }_0+\frac{1}{2}{\chi }_1^2$: for $T>0$, its approximate tail probability is $\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{Pr}({\chi }_1^2\ge T)$, and at $T=0$ the nonrandomized p-value is one. This approximation is not an exact guarantee for sixteen rats. Alternatively one can compare consistently defined restricted likelihoods with the same $X$ and simulate their restricted-ratio null distribution, as in the RLRsim documentation.