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MCMCglmm zero-altered

2 messages · Brickhill, Daisy, Jarrod Hadfield

#
Hi,

To use a ZAP model to test whether there is any zero inflation or  
deflation effects you want to hold the parameters constant across the  
Poisson and zero-altered part and compare them to a model in which  
they vary.

For the random effects this comparison would be random=~colony versus  
something more complex (idh(trait):colony or us(trait):colony). For  
the fixed effects you want to compare ~1 versus ~trait and  
percent.grass2 versus trait:percent.grass2 etc.

  For the overdispersion term MCMCglmm will not allow you to have the  
same "residual" for both parts, but ~trait:units allows the  
"residuals" for both parts to have the same distribution (although  
information regarding its variance only comes from the Poisson part).   
I believe this still allows valid testing of whether there is any  
zero-alteration or not (but as always, could be wrong). In the  
trait:units model you do NOT want to fix the variance: in your second  
prior you had fix=2 despite estimating a single variance(V=diag(1)) so  
it was probably ignored anyway.  I thought I had implemented MCMCglmm  
so it would generate an error if fix>nrow(V) - did you not get this?

Cheers,

Jarrod




Quoting "Brickhill, Daisy" <r01db11 at abdn.ac.uk> on Tue, 31 Jul 2012  
16:18:50 +0100: