Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Estimating The Selection Gradient Of A Function-Valued Trait, Tyler John Baur

Theses and Dissertations

Kirkpatrick and Heckman initiated the study of function-valued traits in 1989. How to estimate the selection gradient of a function-valued trait is a major question asked by evolutionary biologists. In this dissertation, we give an explicit expansion of the selection gradient and construct estimators based on two different samples: one consisting of independent organisms (the independent case), and the other consisting of independent families of equally related organisms (the dependent case).

In the independent case we first construct and prove the joint consistency of sieve estimators of the mean and covariance functions of a Gaussian process, based on previous developments …