Parsimoniously Fitting Large Multivariate Random Effects in glmmTMB

Abstract: Multivariate random effects with unstructured variance-covariance matrices of large dimensions, $q$, can be a major challenge to estimate. In this paper, we introduce a new implementation of a reduced-rank approach to fit large dimensional multivariate random effects by writing them as a linear combination of $d < q$ latent variables. By adding reduced-rank functionality to the package glmmTMB, we enhance the mixed models available to include random effects of dimensions that were previously not possible. We apply the reduced-rank random effect to two examples, estimating a generalized latent variable model for multivariate abundance data and a random-slopes model.