100  Ignoring Non-Impact Records During Estimation (NM73)

Introduction to NONMEM 7.6.0

Typically users may produce data files that are augmented with additional non-dose, non-observation records in order to output predicted values at additional times to create high resolution curves. However, too many of such records tend to slow down the estimation analysis. As of NM73, if an MDV is set to a value greater than or equal to 100, it is converted to that value minus 100 upon input, but will not be used during estimation or covariance assessment, only for table outputting. This option allows you to use the same file for estimation and table outputs, without significantly slowing down the estimation. So if MDV=101, it will be converted to 1 upon use for final evaluations, and the records will be ignored during estimation.

The subroutines in NONMEM that ignore MDV=100 and MDV=101 records are: OBJ (all estimation and covariance steps), OBJ2 (parametric), OBJ3 (non-parametric), and OS (initial estimates of OMEGAs and SIGMAs). Care must be taken in using MDV>=100, in that during estimation, covariate data items of these records are not used, which can have a slightly different interpolation impact than what is finally recorded in the tables where they are used. You may specifically request that any one of these routines not ignore the MDV>=100 records, by setting MDVI1=1 (for OBJ to include MDV>=100 records), MDVI2=1 (for OBJ2 to include MDV>=100 records), MDVI3=1 (for OBJ3 to include MDV>100 records), in a $PK or $PRED block, for example:

$PK
include nonmem_reserved_general
MDVI1=1
MDVI2=1
MDVI3=1