The R Package geepack for Generalized Estimating Equations

Abstract

This paper describes the core features of the R package geepack, which implements the generalized estimating equations (GEE) approach for fitting marginal generalized linear models to clustered data. Clustered data arise in many applications such as longitudinal data and repeated measures. The GEE approach focuses on models for the mean of the correlated observations within clusters without fully specifying the joint distribution of the observations. It has been widely used in statistical practice. This paper illustrates the application of the GEE approach with geepack through an example of clustered binary data.

Keywords

• generalized estimating equation
• random effect
• mixed model
• quasi-likelihood