Full factorial breeding designs are useful for quantifying the amount of additive genetic, nonadditive genetic, and maternal variance that explain phenotypic traits. Such variance estimates are important for examining evolutionary potential. Traditionally, full factorial mating designs have been analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance, which may produce negative variance values and is not...

Among the many uses for sensitivity analysis is factor prioritization—that is, the determination of which factor, once fixed to its true value, on average leads to the greatest reduction in the variance of an output. A key assumption is that a given factor can, through further research, be fixed to some point on its domain. In general, this is an optimistic assumption, which can lead to inappro...

In this paper a fixed design regression model where the errors follow a strictly stationary process is considered. In this model the conditional mean function and the conditional variance function are unknown curves. Correlated errors when observations are missing in the response variable are assumed. Four nonparametric estimators of the conditional variance function based on local polynomial f...

We address the problem of selecting which variables should be included in the fixed and random components of logistic mixed effects models for correlated data. A fully Bayesian variable selection is implemented using a stochastic search Gibbs sampler to estimate the exact model-averaged posterior distribution. This approach automatically identifies subsets of predictors having nonzero fixed eff...

When using the ordered weighted average operator, it can happen that one wants to optimize the variability (measured by the entropy (maximal) or by the variance (minimal)) of the weights while keeping the orness of this operator at a fixed level. This has been considered by several authors. Dually, there might be some contexts where one wishes to maximize the orness while guaranteeing some fixe...

Pyrosequencing is emerging as one of the important next-generation sequencing technologies. We derive the statistical distributions of this technique in terms of nucleotide probabilities of the target sequences. We give exact distributions both for fixed number of flow cycles and for fixed sequence length. Explicit formulas are derived for the mean and variance of these distributions. In both c...

This study examined competition effects on ADG in the feedlot of 1,882 Hereford bulls representing 8 birth years from a selection experiment. Each year, 8 feedlot pens were used to feed bulls in groups, with 2 pens nested within each of the 4 selection lines. Gains were recorded for up to 8 periods of 28 d. Models for analyses included pen effects (fixed or random), fixed effects such as year a...

This study was undertaken to apply the logistic model with nonlinear mixed effects to model growth in Japanese quail. Nonlinear mixed models (NLMM) allow for the inclusion of random factors in a linear manner, which accounts for the between-individual variability and heterogeneous variance. A fixed effects model (M1) was compared with NLMM containing either 1 (M2) or 2 (M3) random effects using...