Recently, variable selection methods using penalized likelihood with a shrink penalty function have been widely studied in various statistical models including generalized linear models and survival models. In particular, they select important variables and estimate coefficients of covariates simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a penalized h-likelihood method for variable selection in gamma frailty models. For this we use the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty function, which satisfies a good property in variable selection. The proposed method is illustrated using simulation study and a practical data set.

Selecting relevant variables for a statistical model is very important in regression analysis. Recently, variable selection methods using a penalized likelihood have been widely studied in various regression models. The main advantage of these methods is that they select important variables and estimate the regression coefficients of the covariates, simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a simple procedure based on a penalized h-likelihood (HL) for variable selection in Poisson hierarchical generalized linear models (HGLMs) for correlated count data. For this we consider three penalty functions (LASSO, SCAD and HL), and derive the corresponding variable-selection procedures. The proposed method is illustrated using a practical example.