How to pass a named list to the dots (`...`) argument of a function (specifically `anova`) in R? (alternatives to `do.call`)

Question

I have a list of mixed models output of lme4::lmer which I want to pass to anova which has the form anova(object, ...), so I do

models_list <- list("lmm1" = lmm1, "lmm2" = lmm2, "lmm3" = lmm3, "lmm4" = lmm4, "lmm5" = lmm5)
do.call(anova, c(models_list[[1]], models_list[-1]))
Warning in anova.merMod(new("lmerMod", resp = new("lmerResp", .xData = <environment>),  :
  failed to find model names, assigning generic names

I get the result, but with the generic names remarked by the warning, so the same result as if models_list was not named. I asked also on github (https://github.com/lme4/lme4/issues/612), but using do.call seems that I won't be able to solve this issue. Is there some other way?

Reproducible example

library(lme4)
fm1 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject), sleepstudy)
fm2 <- lmer(Reaction ~ Days + (Days || Subject), sleepstudy)
anova(fm1,fm2)
refitting model(s) with ML (instead of REML)
Data: sleepstudy
Models:
fm2: Reaction ~ Days + ((1 | Subject) + (0 + Days | Subject))
fm1: Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject)
    npar    AIC    BIC  logLik deviance  Chisq Df Pr(>Chisq)
fm2    5 1762.0 1778.0 -876.00   1752.0                     
fm1    6 1763.9 1783.1 -875.97   1751.9 0.0639  1     0.8004
# so I can see fm2 and fm2, to which model corresponds each line, but
models_list <- list("fm1" = fm1, "fm2" = fm2)
do.call(anova, c(lmaux[[1]], lmaux[-1]))
Warning in anova.merMod(new("lmerMod", resp = new("lmerResp", .xData = <environment>),  :
  failed to find model names, assigning generic names
refitting model(s) with ML (instead of REML)
Data: sleepstudy
Models:
MODEL2: Reaction ~ Days + ((1 | Subject) + (0 + Days | Subject))
MODEL1: Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject)
       npar    AIC    BIC  logLik deviance  Chisq Df Pr(>Chisq)
MODEL2    5 1762.0 1778.0 -876.00   1752.0                     
MODEL1    6 1763.9 1783.1 -875.97   1751.9 0.0639  1     0.8004

so the model names fm1, fm2 were replaced with MODEL2, MODEL1; this is a problem if the model names are given by changing (possibly non-consecutive) numbers.

I have checked possible questions of which these would be a kind of duplicate, as

• How to pass a list to a function in R?
• Pass partial list of arguments to do.call()
• How to pass extra argument to the function argument of do.call in R

but have not found any satisfactory answer.

Thank you!

Answer 1

anova.merMod uses non-standard evaluation (NSE) to get the model names. As is often the case, NSE is more trouble than it's worth. Here is a solution:

eval(
  do.call(
    call, 
    c(list("anova"), 
      lapply(names(models_list), as.symbol)), 
    quote = TRUE), 
  models_list)

#refitting model(s) with ML (instead of REML)
#Data: sleepstudy
#Models:
#fm2: Reaction ~ Days + ((1 | Subject) + (0 + Days | Subject))
#fm1: Reaction ~ Days + (Days | Subject)
#    npar    AIC    BIC  logLik deviance  Chisq Df Pr(>Chisq)
#fm2    5 1762.0 1778.0 -876.00   1752.0                     
#fm1    6 1763.9 1783.1 -875.97   1751.9 0.0639  1     0.8004

The solution creates a call. That is done with the call function as usual. However, here we need to pass the (quoted) arguments as a list using do.call. We then evaluate this call within the list of models.

I would try to avoid having this in production code because it's quite complex and therefore difficult to maintain.