Hi,
I am working in E-SURGE and I have a covariable with three levels (in the headed format input file).
1= males captured first time as juvenile
2= females captured first time as adults
3= males captured first time as adults
There are no females captured first time as juvenile, this is not strange for the biology of the species.
I have 3 states (healthy, sick, died) and four events because there are captures of individuals that I don’t know if they are healty or sick.
I have two transition steps, survival and, conditioned on survival, transition (healthy->sick and vice versa).
Question 1.
I have some trouble to write GEMACO sentences for additivity when the covariate does not come directly from the input file. For instance, how can I write this sentence in GEMACO for, say, survival?
“juvenile males”+(“sex of adults” + ”state” * “time”)
I.e. I want to get an estimate for juvenile males, and an additive effect between sex of adults and the interaction of state and time.
My attempt was to first create these shortcuts:
juvmal=[a(1).g(1)]
sexad=[g(2)+a(2).g(1)&g(3)] (I wanted to create a variable with two levels and did not find another way, the coma does not work in these cases)
and after write (for survival):
juvmal+[sexad+f.t]
But it doesn’t seem to work as I would, it seems that for each state it has done three parallel (additive effect) lines varying with time, one for juveniles males, one for adult females, and one for adult males.
Question 2.
In general, how can I keep track of who is who in the output file when I have used shortcuts? For instance in the previous sentence for survival I believed that juvmal was set as group 3 in the result file (given it was the only one without time effect - but it wasn't!). I don’t understand how it is assigned in the result file who is who.