Comparison of Hierarchical and Marginal Likelihood Estimators for Binary Outcomes

Likelihood estimation in random-effect models is often complicated because the marginal likelihood involves an analytically intractable integral. Numerical integration such as Gauss-Hermite quadrature is an option, but is generally not recommended when the dimensionality of the integral is high. An alternative is the use of hierarchical likelihood, which avoids such burdensome numerical integration. These two approaches for fitting binary data are compared and the advantages of using the hierarchical likelihood are discussed. Random-effect models for binary outcomes and for bivariate binary-continuous outcomes are considered.