Abstract
The ‘DHARMa’ package uses a simulation-based approach to create readily interpretable scaled (quantile) residuals for fitted generalized linear (mixed) models. Currently supported are linear and generalized linear (mixed) models from ‘lme4’ (classes ‘lmerMod’, ‘glmerMod’), ‘glmmTMB’, ‘GLMMadaptive’ and ‘spaMM’; phylogenetic linear models from ‘phylolm’ (classes ‘phylolm’ and ‘phyloglm’); generalized additive models (‘gam’ from ‘mgcv’); ‘glm’ (including ‘negbin’ from ‘MASS’, but excluding quasi-distributions) and ‘lm’ model classes. Moreover, externally created simulations, e.g. posterior predictive simulations from Bayesian software such as ‘JAGS’, ‘STAN’, or ‘BUGS’ can be processed as well. The resulting residuals are standardized to values between 0 and 1 and can be interpreted as intuitively as residuals from a linear regression. The package also provides a number of plot and test functions for typical model misspecification problems, such as over/underdispersion, zero-inflation, and residual spatial, temporal and phylogenetic autocorrelation.
The interpretation of conventional residuals for generalized linear (mixed) and other hierarchical statistical models is often problematic. As an example, here the result of conventional Deviance, Pearson and raw residuals for two Poisson GLMMs, one that is lacking a quadratic effect, and one that fits the data perfectly. Could you tell which is the correct model?