Fit an Analysis of Variance Model

Description

Fit an analysis of variance model by a call to lm for each stratum.

Usage

aov(formula, data = NULL, projections = FALSE, qr = TRUE,

    contrasts = NULL, ...)

Arguments

Details

This provides a wrapper to lm for fitting linear models to balanced or unbalanced experimental designs.

The main difference from lm is in the way print, summary and so on handle the fit: this is expressed in the traditional language of the analysis of variance rather than that of linear models.

If the formula contains a single Error term, this is used to specify error strata, and appropriate models are fitted within each error stratum.

The formula can specify multiple responses.

Weights can be specified by a weights argument, but should not be used with an Error term, and are incompletely supported (e.g., not by model.tables).

Value

An object of class c("aov", "lm") or for multiple responses of class c("maov", "aov", "mlm", "lm") or for multiple error strata of class "aovlist". There are print and summary methods available for these.

Note

aov is designed for balanced designs, and the results can be hard to interpret without balance: beware that missing values in the response(s) will likely lose the balance. If there are two or more error strata, the methods used are statistically inefficient without balance, and it may be better to use lme in package nlme.