[Rsiena-help] Error in x$FRAN(zsmall, xsmall) : Unlikely to terminate this epoch: more than 1000000 steps

[Tom Snijders]

Dear Philip,

I am surprised that the problem still occurs when setting cond=FALSE, and I do not understand that.

The reason for this error message in conditional estimation is that the algorithm of Section 4.2 in Snijders (Sociological Methodology, 2001) is used, and the stopping criterion given by (23) in that paper is never reached, because the distance defined in (22) reaches an asymptotic value (around which it fluctuates stochastically) that is lower than the observed value c_m. This is also why it may happen sometimes but not always: by chance the fluctuations may be such that the distance is reached in a limited amount of time, and from there the parameter change is such that the parameter comes in a region where the stopping rule behaves more acceptably. Also for a number of clusters greater than 1 there will be some difference.

This depends on the model and the starting value. The fact that it depends on the version of RSiena or RSienaTest is probably because for two-mode networks we have changed the starting value. 

Another solution is to use a different (better) starting value.

Still, the fact that cond=FALSE does not improve things is strange. Perhaps there is some difference between one-mode and two-mode networks that I do not realize. If indeed cond=FALSE also gives the error, then you could send me (directly, not through this list) the data & code to let me check things.

Best regards,
Tom



================================================================
Tom A.B. Snijders
Professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences
Department of Politics and Department of Statistics
Nuffield College
University of Oxford
tel. +44-01865-278599


-----Original Message-----
From: rsiena-help-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org [mailto:rsiena-help-bounces at lists.r-forge.r-project.org] On Behalf Of Philip Leifeld
Sent: 08 April 2014 14:56
To: rsiena-help at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
Subject: [Rsiena-help] Error in x$FRAN(zsmall, xsmall) : Unlikely to terminate this epoch: more than 1000000 steps

Hi,

I am relatively new to RSiena, so hello to everybody on this list. I am currently replicating a two-mode RSiena analysis that was published a while ago by somebody else. I have the data and I have the code and I can reasonably well replicate two of the three models reported, but I keep getting an error message during the estimation of the third model. 
The probability that this error message shows up seems to vary across RSiena versions. I thought maybe you could let me know your thoughts on what may be causing the problem or how to avoid it. Here is what I get after about five minutes:

Phase 2 Subphase 1 Iteration 3 Progress: 14% Error in x$FRAN(zsmall, xsmall) :
   Unlikely to terminate this epoch:  more than 1000000 steps
Calls: siena07 ... proc2subphase -> doIterations -> <Anonymous> -> .Call

I found an old thread in the archive of this mailing list where somebody had the same problem. In that case, the advice was to try unconditional estimation. Here is the message:

http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/rsiena-help/2012-March/000237.html

In my case, there is also only one dependent network, so I tried sienaModelCreate(cond = FALSE), but it did not change anything. The other potential reason reported in the thread was that the composition change was possibly too substantial. However, in the data I am dealing with, the vast majority of both node types persists between consecutive time steps, and apparently the estimation worked in the original analysis, otherwise the authors couldn't have reported their results.

Interestingly, the problem varies across RSiena versions. First, I was using r267 (the most recent build on R-Forge) and r232 (the current stable release on CRAN) on my desktop computer, and the problem showed up every single time and usually around the tenth iteration. Then I started to use r169, which is the version the original authors were using in their original analysis (as reported in the paper), and the problem disappeared, except for every 10th estimation or so on average (still during the tenth iteration). Then I thought, OK, fine, this is not optimal, but I can live with the problem as long as it shows up only every 10th run. So I installed r169 also on the HPC cluster I have access to, and there it seems to produce the error message every single time during the third iteration (as in the example message printed above).

I really have no clue (a) what is causing the problem and (b) why its probability of occurrence seems to vary across versions and computers.

In one of the earlier e-mails cited above, Tom Snijders stated that the problem is most likely due to "fitting a model which is too complicated for your data" and that one should go one step back and build a simpler model, and then add other model terms step by step. While I agree that this is a good strategy for model-building, this is not really satisfactory for a replication because the very goal is to test whether the same model with the same data leads approximately to the same coefficients and standard errors. I was also wondering whether this error message is basically a sign of degeneracy, similar to estimating a degenerate model in statnet, but with an error message rather than hard-to-detect convergence issues.

I would be happy to receive feedback about what exactly is going on or how to avoid the problem. Thanks very much in advance!

Philip

--
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Konstanz, Germany, and
Eawag, ETH domain, Switzerland
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