R help - Apr 2005 - Fluctuating asymmetry and measurement error

Hi all, 

Has anyone tested for FA in R? I need to seperate out the variance due to
measurement error from variation between individuals (following Palmer &
Strobeck 1986).



Andy Higginson

Animal Behaviour and Ecology Research Group
School of Biology
University of Nottingham
NG7 2RD
U.K.


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Hi Andrew,

Bear with me as it's a while since I did this and I was new to R at
the time, but lme is probably what you're after. Remember that you're
actually not all that interested in _individual_ variance, because FA
is a sample-level property.

You'll want to set up something like:

Treatment Individual Measure Result
1          1          1       foo
1          1          2       bar
1          2          1
1          2          2
2          3          1
2          3          2
2          4          1
2          4          2

Where result is absolute R-L, assuming you've done the checks for
size-dependence and so in. Then run an lme something like:

library(nlme)
test <- lme(Result ~ Treatment, random = list(Individual=~1))

Bearing in mind that you're not actually interested in the
individuals, you can either just include the multiple measures for each
individual and only worry about the remaining variance at the
'Treatment'
level, or you could do another model with 
"random = list(Measure=~1,Individual=~1)", then run:

anova(model1, model2)

This will tell you if the measurement term on its own is contributing
anything useful. In general it's better to have fewer factors, FA
analysis is low enough in power without cluttering it up.

Hope that helps. Now the R-gurus will probably tell you how you should
actually do the lme :)

Regards,
Chris
> Message: 29
> Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:22:21 +0100
> From: "Andrew Higginson" <plxadh at nottingham.ac.uk>
> Subject: [R] Fluctuating asymmetry and measurement error
> To: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> Message-ID: <s25d393d.093 at ccw0m1.nottingham.ac.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
> 
> Hi all, 
> 
> Has anyone tested for FA in R? I need to seperate out the variance due to
measurement error from variation between individuals (following Palmer &
Strobeck 1986).
> 
> 
> 
> Andy Higginson
> 
> Animal Behaviour and Ecology Research Group
> School of Biology
> University of Nottingham
> NG7 2RD
> U.K.
> 
-- 

Chris Longson
PhD student
Department of Biological Sciences
Macquarie University
+61 2 9850 8190
clongson at bio.mq.edu.au | www.tinyurl.com/7x25n

"We found the flat paper rises on its own as it falls, which would not
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