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MCMCglmm specification

Hi,

I think the model makes sense, although the priors you use are likely  
to be quite informative with so few individuals. idh structures with  
nu=2 is equivalent to fitting a prior to each individual variance with  
nu=2. (Note this changed in versions >=2.05 see Section 3.6.2 of the  
CourseNotes, because the old specification was creating confusion).  
Generally nu=2 is high, but especially if you have 14 individuals  
whose "effect" will be poorly resolved with 4 observations. Also,  
rather than fitting the id random effect for the zero-inflation but  
fixing the associated variance to zero, you could just leave it it  
out.  random = ~idh(at.level(trait,1)):id  -  it should ru a bit  
quicker.

I also noticed the traces look ed pretty bad for the parameters of the  
zero-inflated model. This seems to be a general problem with ZIP  
models (in MCMCglmm) particularly when zero-inflation is close to zero  
or one. Hurdle models, and zero-altered models fit similar models but  
they tend to mix much better. The zero-altered model in particular, is  
a nice way of assessing whether zero-inflation (or deflation) exists.

Cheers,

Jarrod



Quoting Ray Danner <rdanner at vt.edu>: