Data on 368 birth records of Swedish Red and White cattle herd raised organically at Dogan Organic Dairy Cattle Farm for a period of 2006 and 2009 (4 years) were used to estimate the effects of different environmental factors on birth weight. Additionally, a comparison of four methods for variance component estimation to compute heritability of birth weight was performed using ML (Maximum likel...

The main aim of sire evaluation is to obtain an accurate, efficient and ranking them according to their merit so as to enable the breeder to choose the best bulls. Today, the need for sire evaluation for their additive genetic ability (breeding values) or transmitting ability to its progeny has been recognized. For assessing the breeding values of bulls for the traits viz. age at first calving ...

Genetic parameters and breeding values were estimated based on 11 708 daily milk yields from 2255 lactations (1351 sheep, 19 different flocks) between the years 2004 and 2010. The pedigree covered 2334 individuals, including both the recorded animals and their known ancestors. The fixed effects were estimated by the least-squares method, while the genetic parameters were estimated by the REML m...

This document contains supplementary material to the paper “Fast smoothing parameter separation in multidimensional generalized P-splines: the SAP algorithm”. A description on how to obtain the derivatives of the approximate restricted maximum likelihood (REML) with respect to the variance components is given, as well as the closed-form expressions for maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of the v...

SUMMARY In dairy cattle breeding, genetic relationships among lactatio are of special interest because most selection operates on first la: This selection also complicates estimation of genetic Techniques which give estimates unbiased by selection should Estimation was done using EM-type REML for an animal relationships across herds. Records were from 3,070 Holstein cows the first lactation rec...

This handout describes the analysis of a repeated-measures experimental design with two crossed among-subjects factors and repeated-measures on a third (withinsubjects) factor. It presents the analysis described in the text: univariate ANOVA with the conservative F test, along with assessment of the validity of the model and with analysis of the effects. A later handout will present linear mixe...

OBJECTIVE Covariance functions (CF) are, in essence, the ‘infinite-dimensional’ equivalent to covariance matrices for traits measured repeatedly, potentially infinitely many times, along some continuous scale such as time or age. CFs produce a continuous description of the covariance structure over time, giving the covariance between any two ages as a function of the ages. DXMRR allows the esti...