This article studies model averaging for linear mixed-effects models. We establish an unbiased estimator of the squared risk for the model averaging, and use the estimator as a criterion for choosing weights. The resulting model average estimator is proved to be asymptotically optimal under some regularity conditions. Simulation experiments show it is superior or comparable to estimators based on the final models selected by the commonly-used methods and some existing averaging procedures. The proposed procedure is applied to data from an AIDS clinic trial.

A crucial component of performing sufficient dimension reduction is to determine the structural dimension of the reduction model. We propose a novel information criterion-based method for this purpose, a special feature of which is that when examining the goodness-of-fit of the current model, one needs to perform model evaluation by using an enlarged candidate model. Although the procedure does not require estimation under the enlarged model of dimension k+1, the decision as to how well the current model of dimension k fits relies on the validation provided by the enlarged model; thus we call this procedure the validated information criterion, vic(k). Our method is different from existing information criterion-based model selection methods; it breaks free from dependence on the connection between dimension reduction models and their corresponding matrix eigenstructures, which relies heavily on a linearity condition that we no longer assume. We prove consistency of the proposed method, and its finite-sample performance is demonstrated numerically.