Systematic deviation in smooth mixed models for multi-level longitudinal data

The analysis of longitudinal data or repeated measurements is an important and growing area of Statistics. In this context, data come in different formats but typically, they have a hierarchical or multi-level structure including group and subject components, and the main purpose of the analysis is usually to estimate these components from the data. A standard way to perform this estimation is via mixed models. In this paper, we show that the estimated group effects from standard smooth mixed models can deviate systematically from the underlying group mean, leading to wrong conclusions about the data. We then present two ways to avoid such systematic deviations and misinterpretations when fitting flexible mixed models to multi-level data. The first method is a marginal procedure, and the second method is based on the conditional distribution of the subject effects derived from appropriate constraints. Both methods are robust against mis-specification of the covariance structure in the sense that they allow one to resolve the lack of centring found in standard smooth mixed models.