Generalized Estimating Equations | General, R, and SPSS Resources

November 9, 2009

(This article was first published on Jeromy Anglim's Blog: Psychology and Statistics, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

I was recently asked about Generalised Estimating Equations (GEEs). I haven't yet used the technique, but it's on my list of things to learn more about. This post catalogues some of the Internet resources on GEEs.
General Resources

Hanley et al (2003, Generalized Estimating Equations: An Orientation) provide an introduction to GEEs with an emphasis on epidemiological examples. It is designed to be accessible to non-statisticians.
Horton and Lipsitz (1999, Review of Software to Fit GEE) provide an overview of generalized estimating equations and review several statistical packages (SAS, Stata, SUDAAN, S-Plus). Note that the review took place in 1999. Software has changed. The review does not include the more recent R packages or GENLIN in SPSS.

R Resources

Halekoh, Hojsgaard, and Yan (2006, R Package geepack for Generalized Estimating Equations) discuss theory and use of the R package geepack. Hojsgaard (2006) posted a presentation related to the package. Zuur et al (2009) have a book (Chapter 12 is on GEEs) and they provide R code examples using geeglm on their website (see "Chapter12.r").
There's the gee package. Everitt and Hothorn show an example of using gee.

SPSS Resources

SPSS provides an outline of the features in GENLIN. At the time of writing GENLIN was available as part of the "Advanced Statistics" add-on module. In my version it shows up under the Analyze - Generalized Linear Models menu.
SPSS Advanced Models (Chapter 7 of SPSS Advanced Models(tm) - Generalied Estimating Equations): This document goes through in detail the various options that are available in SPSS.
UCLA has a tutorial on using GENLIN in SPSS
David Garson discusses the procedure extensively. Discussion is grounded in SPSS.