Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Simple Estimations Of The Variance Components And The Fixed And Random Effects In Mixed, Three-Stage, Hierarchal Models, C. Philip Cox

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

FRR (Fixed, Random, Random) hierarchal models in which the first-stage" elements are fixed and the second and third-stage elements are random, are used in analyses of comparative experiments and, extensively, in animal breeding contexts where, in the latter, estimates of the second-stage elements and of combinations of them with first-stage elements, are of practical interest. The two procedures, i) empirical BLUP (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction) and ii) a Bayesian approach, used when the ratio of the within-second-stages and the within-third-stages variances is unknown are 'computationally intensive'. When the ratio of the second- to the third-stage variances is large, an alternative …