#delta_method

Nonlinear combinations of model parameters in regression

Published at January 9, 2020 ·  11 min read

Nonlinear regression plays an important role in my research and teaching activities. While I often use the ‘drm()’ function in the ‘drc’ package for my research work, I tend to prefer the ‘nls()’ function for teaching purposes, mainly because, in my opinion, the transition from linear models to nonlinear models is smoother, for beginners. One problem with ‘nls()’ is that, in contrast to ‘drm()’, it is not specifically tailored to the needs of biologists or students in biology....


Stabilising transformations: how do I present my results?

Published at June 15, 2019 ·  5 min read

ANOVA is routinely used in applied biology for data analyses, although, in some instances, the basic assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity of residuals do not hold. In those instances, most biologists would be inclined to adopt some sort of stabilising transformations (logarithm, square root, arcsin square root…), prior to ANOVA. Yes, there might be more advanced and elegant solutions, but stabilising transformations are suggested in most traditional biometry books, they are very straightforward to apply and they do not require any specific statistical software....


How do we combine errors, in biology? The delta method

Published at May 25, 2019 ·  7 min read

In a recent post I have shown that we can build linear combinations of model parameters (see here ). For example, if we have two parameter estimates, say Q and W, with standard errors respectively equal to \(\sigma_Q\) and \(\sigma_W\), we can build a linear combination as follows: \[Z = AQ + BW + C\] where A, B and C are three coefficients. The standard error for this combination can be obtained as:...