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Phylogenetic meta-analysis and setting animal variable in MCMCglmm

Dear Wayne,

This is my fault. With phylogenies the ancestral nodes are treated as  
missing data and so I set their measurement error to an arbitrary  
value. The code for working out how many "new" measurement errors  
there are  was incorrect.

L98 of MCMCglmm.R should read

mev<-c(mev, rep(1, dim(missing.combinations)[1]))

not

mev<-c(mev, rep(1, length(missing.combinations)))

I'll change this is in the next version.  In the mean time there are  
two work arounds that should give exactly the same results:

A)

specify nodes="TIPS" in the MCMCglmm function. This avoids augmenting  
with internal nodes, but can be much slower because the correlation  
structure is no longer sparse. The mixing properties can be better.

B)



Include the random effect

idh(sqrt(mev)):units  or idh(sqrt(RGR_meanVAR)):units in your case.

and set the variance for this term to 1:

prior$G$G2<-list(V=1, n=0.002, fix=1)

  This is equivalent because the random design matrix Z is diagonal  
matrix with the standard errors on the diagonal.  vZZ' defines the  
expected covariance structure of the measurement errors, and since v=1  
this is equal to independent measurement errors with variance equal o  
mev.

Cheers,

Jarrod
On 18 Sep 2009, at 09:39, Dawson Wayne wrote: