Waldmann, Patrik
- Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Multi-trait (co)variance estimation is an important topic in plant and animal breeding. In this study we compare estimates obtained with restricted maximum likelihood (REML) and Bayesian Gibbs sampling of simulated data and of three traits (diameter, height and branch angle) from a 26-year-old partial diallel progeny test of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.). Based on the results from the simulated data we can conclude that the REML estimates are accurate but the mode of posterior distributions from the Gibbs sampling can be overestimated depending on the level of the heritability. The mean and median of the posteriors were considerably higher than the expected values of the heritabilities. The confidence intervals calculated with the delta method were biased downwardly. The highest probablity density (HPD) interval provides a better interval estimate, but could be slightly biased at the lower level. Similar differences between REML and Gibbs sampling estimates were found for the Scots pine data. We conclude that further simulation studies are needed in order to evaluate the effect of different priors on (co)variance components in the genetic individual model.
Published in
TAG Theoretical and Applied Genetics
2006, volume: 112, number: 8, pages: 1441-1451
Publisher: SPRINGER
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Forest Science
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-006-0246-x
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/8953