A typical predictor has the form response ~ terms where response is the (numeric) response vector and terms is a series of terms which specifies a linear predictor for response. For binomial and quasibinomial families the response can also be specified as a factor (when the first level denotes failure and all others success) or as a two-column matrix with the columns giving the numbers of successes and failures. A terms specification of the form first + second indicates all the terms in first together with all the terms in second with any duplicates removed.

A specification of the form first:second indicates the set of terms obtained by taking the interactions of all terms in first with all terms in second. The specification first*second indicates the cross of first and second. This is the same as first + second + first:second.

The terms in the formula will be re-ordered so that main effects come first, followed by the interactions, all second-order, all third-order and so on: to avoid this pass a terms object as the formula.

Non-NULL weights can be used to indicate that different observations have different dispersions (with the values in weights being inversely proportional to the dispersions); or equivalently, when the elements of weights are positive integers \(w_i\), that each response \(y_i\) is the mean of \(w_i\) unit-weight observations. For a binomial GLM prior weights are used to give the number of trials when the response is the proportion of successes: they would rarely be used for a Poisson GLM.

glm.fit is the workhorse function: it is not normally called directly but can be more efficient where the response vector, design matrix and family have already been calculated.

If more than one of etastart, start and mustart is specified, the first in the list will be used. It is often advisable to supply starting values for a quasi family, and also for families with unusual links such as gaussian("log").

All of weights, subset, offset, etastart and mustart are evaluated in the same way as variables in formula, that is first in data and then in the environment of formula.

For the background to warning messages about ‘fitted probabilities numerically 0 or 1 occurred’ for binomial GLMs, see Venables & Ripley (2002, pp.197--8).