Introduction

This web page redoes the analysis in the paper

Charles J. Geyer, Stuart Wagenius, and Ruth G. Shaw (2007).
Aster Models for Life History Analysis.
Biometrika, 94, 415–426.

following the course slides, deck 1 and (for the last box) the end of deck 4.

Data

The data are in the dataset echinacea in the R package aster. But we also want to see what the data look like as a file. That file is the file

echinacea.txt

which we have copied from the source for the R package aster to these web pages.

Set-Up and Model Fitting

Hypothesis Tests

Confidence Intervals

Distribution of Fitness Canonical Statistics

Conclusion: not that much difference between the two models.