Review of Mixed-Effect Models

Abstract

Science has developed with great achievements after Galileo's discovery of the law depicting a relationship between observable variables. However, many natural phenomena have been better explained by models including unobservable random effects. A mixed effect model was the first statistical model that included unobservable random effects. The importance of the mixed effect models is growing along with the advancement of computational technologies to infer complicated phenomena; subsequently mixed effect models have extended to various statistical models such as hierarchical generalized linear models. Hierarchical likelihood has been suggested to estimate unobservable random effects. Our special issue about mixed effect models shows how they can be used in statistical problems as well as discusses important needs for future developments. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches are also investigated.