principal component approach in variance component estimation for international sire evaluation主成分的方差分量估计方法国际陛下评估.pdfVIP

Tyrisevä et al. Genetics Selection Evolution 2011, 43:21 Ge n e t i c s /content/43/1/21 Se l e c t i o n Evolution RESEARCH Open Access Principal component approach in variance component estimation for international sire evaluation 1* 2 3 4 5 1 Anna-Maria Tyrisevä , Karin Meyer , W Freddy Fikse , Vincent Ducrocq , Jette Jakobsen , Martin H Lidauer and Esa A Mäntysaari1 Abstract Background: The dairy cattle breeding industry is a highly globalized business, which needs internationally comparable and reliable breeding values of sires. The international Bull Evaluation Service, Interbull, was established in 1983 to respond to this need. Currently, Interbull performs multiple-trait across country evaluations (MACE) for several traits and breeds in dairy cattle and provides international breeding values to its member countries. Estimating parameters for MACE is challenging since the structure of datasets and conventional use of multiple- trait models easily result in over-parameterized genetic covariance matrices. The number of parameters to be estimated can be reduced by taking into account only the leading principal components of the traits considered. For MACE, this is readily implemented in a random regression model. Methods: This article compares two principal component approaches to estimate variance components for MACE using real datasets. The methods tested were a REML approach that dir