Conversation

Jeremy Koster: My students were looking at the estimated varying intercepts for each higher-level group (or the "BLUP's", as some people seem to call them).
Douglas Bates: As Alan James once said, "these values are just like the BLUPs - Best Linear Unbiased Predictors - except that they aren't linear and they aren't unbiased and there is no clear sense in which they are "best", but other than that ..."
-- Jeremy Koster and Douglas Bates
R-SIG-Mixed-Models (July 2012) #Rstats