Introduction

This web page redoes the analysis of Example 2 in the paper

Ruth G. Shaw, Charles J. Geyer, Stuart Wagenius, Helen H. Hangelbroek, and Julie R. Etterson (2008).
Unifying Life History Analyses for Inference of Fitness and Population Growth.
American Naturalist, 172, E35–E47.

following the course slides, deck 3.

Data

The data are in the dataset echin2 in the R package aster.

Set-Up and Model Fitting

Predictors In and Out

Conclusion: model with model matrix m2 is the best so far.

Indoors Effect

Conclusion: model with model matrix m2 is the still best so far.

Model m3 has no population effects on fitness.

Model m2 has population effects on fitness (acting both outdoors and indoors).

Model m4 has population effects on fitness (acting both outdoors and indoors) and also indoors-only population effects on fitness.

m3 is nested within m2 is nested within m4.

m2 fits the data much better than m3 and just as well as m4. So among these m2 is the most parsimonious model that fits.

Model m5 has only the indoors-only population effects on fitness.

m3 is nested within m5 is nested within m4.

m5 fits the data much worse than m4 and m3 fits worst than that. So among these m4 is the only model that fits.

m2 is not nested within m5 and vice versa. Hence they cannot be compared directly (using a likelihood ratio test). Thus we compared them indirectly by comparing each to m3 and m4.

Predictions