Fixed and random effects selection by REML and pathwise coordinate optimization

We propose a two-stage model selection procedure for the linear mixed-effects models. The procedure consists of two steps: First, penalized restricted log-likelihood is used to select the random effects, and this is done by adopting a Newton-type algorithm. Next, the penalized log-likelihood is used to select the fixed effects via pathwise coordinate optimization to improve the computation efficiency. We prove that our procedure has the oracle properties. Both simulation studies and a real data example are carried out to examine finite sample performance of the proposed fixed and random effects selection procedure. Supplementary materials including R code used in this article and proofs for the theorems are available online.