Why are derivatives important in biology? A case-study with nonlinear regression

Published at June 9, 2021 ·  7 min read

In general, undergraduate students in biology/ecology courses tend to consider the derivatives as a very abstract entity, with no real usefulness in the everyday life. In my work as a teacher, I have often tried to fight against such an attitude, by providing convincing examples on how we can use the derivatives to get a better understanding about the changes on a given system. In this post I’ll tell you about a recent situation where I was involved with derivatives....

Other useful functions for nonlinear regression: threshold models and all that

Published at May 1, 2021 ·  13 min read

In a recent post I presented several equations and just as many self-starting functions for nonlinear regression analyses in R. Today, I would like to build upon that post and present some further equations, relating to the so-called threshold models. But, … what are threshold models? In some instances, we need to describe relationships where the response variable changes abruptly, following a small change in the predictor. A typical threshold model looks like that in the Figure below, where we see three threshold levels:...

The R-squared and nonlinear regression: a difficult marriage?

Published at March 25, 2021 ·  4 min read

Making sure that a fitted model gives a good description of the observed data is a fundamental step of every nonlinear regression analysis. To this aim we can (and should) use several techniques, either graphical or based on formal hypothesis testing methods. However, in the end, I must admit that I often feel the need of displaying a simple index, based on a single and largely understood value, that reassures the readers about the goodness of fit of my models....

lmDiallel: a new R package to fit diallel models. Multienvironment diallel experiments

Published at March 5, 2021 ·  7 min read

In recent times, a few colleagues at my Department and I have devoted some research effort to data management for diallel mating experiments, which we have summarised in a paper (Onofri et al., 2020) and a series of five blog posts (see here). A final topic that remains to be covered relates to the frequent possibility that these diallel experiments are repeated across years and/or locations. How should the resulting dataset be analysed?...

lmDiallel: a new R package to fit diallel models. The Gardner-Eberhart models

Published at February 22, 2021 ·  15 min read

Another post for this series about diallel mating experiments. So far, we have published a paper in Plant Breeding (Onofri et al., 2020), where we presented lmDiallel, a new R package to fit diallel models. We followed up this paper with a series of four blog posts, giving more detail about the package (see here), about the Hayman’s models type 1 (see here) and type 2 (see here) and about the Griffing’s family of models (see here)....

Split-plot designs: the transition to mixed models for a dinosaur

Published at February 11, 2021 ·  15 min read

Those who long ago took courses in ‘analysis of variance’ or ‘experimental design’ … would have learned methods … based on observed and expected mean squares and methods of testing based on ‘error strata’ (if you weren’t forced to learn this, consider yourself lucky). (Douglas Bates, 2006). In a previous post, I already mentioned that, due to my age, I see myself as a dinosaur within the R-users community. I already mentioned how difficult it is, for a dinosaur, to adjust to new concepts and paradigms in data analysis, after having done things differently for a long time ( see this post here )....

Pairwise comparisons in nonlinear regression

Published at January 19, 2021 ·  6 min read

Pairwise comparisons are one of the most debated topic in agricultural research: they are very often used and, sometimes, abused, in literature. I have nothing against the appropriate use of this very useful technique and, for those who are interested, some colleagues and I have given a bunch of (hopefully) useful suggestions in a paper, a few years ago (follow this link here). Pairwise comparisons usually follow the application of some sort of linear or generalised linear model; in this setting, the ‘emmeans’ package (Lenth, 2020) is very handy, as it uses a very logical approach....

lmDiallel: a new R package to fit diallel models. The Griffing's models (1956)

Published at January 12, 2021 ·  10 min read

Diallel mating designs are often used by plant breeders to compare the possible crosses between a set of genotypes. In spite of such widespread usage, the process of data analysis in R is not yet strightforward and it is not clear which tool should be routinely used. We recently gave a small contribution by publishing a paper in Plant Breeding (Onofri et al., 2020 ), where we advocated the idea that models for diallel crosses are just a class of general linear models, that should be fit by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) or REstricted Maximum Likelihood methods (REML)....

lmDiallel: a new R package to fit diallel models. The Hayman's model (type 2)

Published at January 5, 2021 ·  9 min read

This posts follows two other previously published posts, where we presented our new ‘lmDiallel’ package (see here) and showed how we can use it to fit the Hayman’s model type 1, as proposed in Hayman (1954) (see here). In this post, we will give a further example relating to another very widespread model from the same author, the Hayman’s model type 2. We apologise for some overlapping with previous posts: we think this is necessary so that each post can be read on its own....

General code to fit ANOVA models with JAGS and 'rjags'

Published at December 23, 2020 ·  15 min read

One of the reasons why I like BUGS and all related dialects has been put nicely in a very good book, i.e. “Introduction to WinBUGS for ecologists” (Kery, 2010); at page 11, the author says: “WinBUGS helps free the modeler in you”. Ultimately, that statement is true: when I have fully understood a model with all its components (and thus I have become a modeler), I can very logically translate it to BUGS code....