Lifetime reproductive performance is a major issue for the Northern Australian beef industry. Delayed cycling of lactating cows after parturition is one of major causes of reproductive inefficiency and impacts on the profitability of beef businesses. In the CRC for Beef Genetic Technologies, genetic markers have been used to develop prediction equations for the improvement of post partum anoest...

Restricted maximum likelihood (REML) is now well established as a method for estimating the parameters of the general Gaussian linear model with a structured covariance matrix, in particular for mixed linear models. Conventionally, estimates of precision and inference for fixed effects are based on their asymptotic distribution, which is known to be inadequate for some small-sample problems. In...

A version of the nonparametric bootstrap, which resamples the entire subjects from original data, called the case bootstrap, has been increasingly used for estimating uncertainty of parameters in mixed-effects models. It is usually applied to obtain more robust estimates of the parameters and more realistic confidence intervals (CIs). Alternative bootstrap methods, such as residual bootstrap an...

This paper studies Bayesian predictive densities based on different priors and frequentist plug-in type predictive densities when the predicted variables are dependent on the observations. Average Kullback-Leibler divergence to the true predictive density is used to measure the performance of different inference procedures. The notion of second-order KL dominance is introduced, and an explicit ...

Genetic relationships between yield and type traits were investigated using multiple-trait REML procedures with an animal model. Computing strategies were developed to deal with large populations and numbers of traits. Data consisted of records for 3 production and 15 type traits for 20,836 primiparous cows from 1982 to 1988. The model included 2358 herd management effects, 28,749 animal effect...

We describe an extension of our empirical Bayes approach to magnetoencephalography/electroencephalography (MEG/EEG) source reconstruction that covers both evoked and induced responses. The estimation scheme is based on classical covariance component estimation using restricted maximum likelihood (ReML). We have focused previously on the estimation of spatial covariance components under simple a...

The objectives were to estimate the effects of various environmental factors on female calf survival Israeli Holsteins, economic value under conditions, genetic and variance components for cow using individual animal model, perform GWAS analyses first calving herd life after calving, trends since 1985, correlations with traits included in current breeding index, consequences inclusion national ...