I discovered the 'mlogit'-package for multinomial logit models in search of  estimating a multinomial mixed logit model. After reading the excellent  vignette I discovered that I could not apply my data on any of the described examples.

I now write in hope of help with my problem and created a minimal example to illustrate my situation.

The Problem is as follows: There are words with the consonant 'Q' somewhere. Now an experiment was conducted with people who were tasked to listen to these words and say if they heard a Q, an U or some OTHER consonant. This has to modeled in dependence of some factors like syllable position or real/non-real-word.

In the minimal example I created 4 people and their answers with the syllable position.

library(mlogit)
library(nnet)set.seed(1234)
data <- data.frame(personID = as.factor(sample(1:4, 40, replace=TRUE)),
               decision = as.factor(sample(c("Q","U", "other"), 40,
replace=TRUE)),
               syllable = as.factor(sample(1:4, 40, replace=TRUE)))
summary(data)
personID  decision  syllable
1:11     other:10   1:18
2:10     Q    :18   2: 9
3:10     U    :12   3: 5
4: 9                4: 8

As far as I know nnet's multinom function does not cover mixed models.

modNnet1 <- multinom(decision ~ syllable, data=data)

First I used the mlogit.data-function to reshape the file. After discussion with a colleague we came to the conclusion that there is no alternative.specific.variable.

dataMod <- mlogit.data(data, shape="wide", choice="decision", id.var="personID")
mod1 <- mlogit(formula = decision ~ 0|syllable,
           data = dataMod,
           reflevel="Q", rpar=c(personID="n"), panel=TRUE)
  Error in names(sup.coef) <- names.sup.coef :
    'names' attribute [1] must be the same length as the vector [0]

mod2 <- mlogit(formula = decision ~ personID|syllable,
           data = dataMod,
           reflevel="Q", rpar=c(personID="n"), panel=TRUE)
  Error in solve.default(H, g[!fixed]) :
     Lapack routine dgesv: system is exactly singular: U[3,3] = 0

No I do not know what to do, so I ask for help in here. But I believe this kind of problem can be solved with mlogit and I just don't see it yet ;)