multinomial logistic multilevel models in R

Question

Problem: I need to estimate a set of multinomial logistic multilevel models and can’t find an appropriate R package. What is the best R package to estimate such

Answer 1

I'm puzzled that this technique is descried as "standard" and "equivalent", though it might well be a good practical solution. (Guess I'd better to check out the Allison and Dobson & Barnett references). For the simple multinomial case ( no clusters, repeated measures etc.) Begg and Gray (1984) propose using k-1 binomial logits against a reference category as an approximation (though a good one) in many cases to full blown multinomial logit. They demonstrate some loss of efficiency when using a single reference category, though it's small for cases where a single high-frequency baseline category is use as the reference. Agresti (2002: p. 274) provides an example where there is a small increase in standard errors even when the baseline category constitutes over 70% of 219 cases in a five category example.

Maybe it's no big deal, but I don't see how the approximation would get any better adding a second layer of randomness.

References
Agresti, A. (2002). Categorical data analysis. Hoboken NJ: Wiley.

Begg, C. B., & Gray, R. (1984). Calculation of polychotomous logistic regression parameters using individualized regressions. Biometrika, 71(1), 11–18.