Fiducial generalized p-values for testing zero-variance components in linear mixed-effects models

Linear mixed-effects models are widely used in analysis of longitudinal data. However, testing for zero-variance components of random effects has not been well resolved in statistical literature, although some likelihood-based procedures have been proposed and studied. In this article, we propose a generalized p-value based method in coupling with fiducial inference to tackle this problem. The proposed method is also applied to test linearity of the nonparametric functions in additive models. We provide theoretical justifications and develop an implementation algorithm for the proposed method. We evaluate its finite-sample performance and compare it with that of the restricted likelihood ratio test via simulation experiments. We illustrate the proposed approach using an application from a nutritional study.