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Heritability of ordinal data in MCMCglmm and estimating fixed effects

3 messages · Samantha Patrick, David Duffy

1 day later
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On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Samantha Patrick wrote:

            
Why are there repeated measures?  Is the between-occasion variation of
interest, or a nuisance?  That is, is animal/(animal+units) a better 
measure of h2?
doesn't work.

How many levels of BYEAR, how many obs per year, do you 
want a random regression on BYEAR (ie do you expect a linear 
relationship?)
BLUPs are what you want, curse them ;)
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Hi David

Le 31/10/2012 05:49, David Duffy a ?crit :
>> There are between 1-4 measures of Trait 1 per individual.  I have 
run the model using only the first measure per individual  (as in h2 = 
animal/(animal+units)).  It has little effect on the heritability.  I 
have kept in the repeated measures as they allow as to calculate 
consistent environmentally induced differences ( see 
http://www.wildanimalmodels.org/tiki-index.php?page=repeated%20measures), and 
as I understand, it is better to use the full data set and control for 
any non independence.
>>> In what way? Sorry I don't quite understand this...
>>> BYEAR is a factor with 27 levels; a quick summary observations per 
level:
0-5 obs = 3 levels
5-10 obs = 2 levels
20-50 obs = 10 levels
50-85 obs = 12 levels

There is no reason to suppose it would be a linear relationship; instead 
it is likely to represent cohort effects as a result of similarities 
between birds born in the same year so I have not tried to fit it as a 
random regression.
>>> The problem is for Gaussian data, Individual would be fitted as a 
fixed effect in the model, such that in its simplest form the model 
would be:

Trait1~ Colony + ID

and then the parameter estimates are extracted for ID and these are used 
as the individual measures.  This does not involve taking residuals from 
the model so seems to be statistically more sound than using BLUPs.  
While the two are normally highly correlated, there are differences and 
it seems unwise to go back to a method that has received much criticism.

Many thanks for your comments

Sam