  This paper is concerned with the selection of fixed effects along with the
estimation of fixed effects, random effects and variance components in the
linear mixed-effects model. We introduce a selection procedure based on an
adaptive ridge (AR) penalty of the profiled likelihood, where the covariance
matrix of the random effects is Cholesky factorized. This selection procedure
is intended to both low and high-dimensional settings where the number of fixed
effects is allowed to grow exponentially with the total sample size, yielding
technical difficulties due to the non-convex optimization problem induced by L0
penalties. Through extensive simulation studies, the procedure is compared to
the LASSO selection and appears to enjoy the model selection consistency as
well as the estimation consistency.
