Abordagem bayesiana para curva de crescimento com restrições nos parâmetros

Abstract

The adjustment of the weight-age growth curves for animals plays an important role in animal production planning. These adjusted growth curves must be coherent with the biological interpretation of animal growth, which often demands imposition of constraints on model parameters.The inference of the parameters of nonlinear models with constraints, using classical techniques, presents various difficulties. In order to bypass those difficulties, a bayesian approach for adjustment of the growing curves is proposed. In this respect the bayesian proposed approach introduces restrictions on model parameters through choice of the prior density. Due to the nonlinearity, the posterior density of those parameters does not have a kernel that can be identified among the traditional distributions, and their moments can only be obtained using numerical techniques. In this work the MCMC simulation (Monte Carlo chain Markov) was implemented to obtain a summary of the posterior density. Besides, selection model criteria were used for the observed data, based on generated samples of the posterior density.The main purpose of this work is to show that the bayesian approach can be of practical use, and to compare the bayesian inference of the estimated parameters considering noninformative prior density (from Jeffreys), with the classical inference obtained by the Gauss-Newton method. Therefore it was possible to observe that the calculation of the confidence intervals based on the asymptotic theory fails, indicating non significance of certain parameters of some models, while in the bayesian approach the intervals of credibility do not present this problem. The programs in this work were implemented in R language,and to illustrate the utility of the proposed method, analysis of real data was performed, from an experiment of evaluation of system of crossing among cows from different herds, implemented by Embrapa Pecuária Sudeste. The data correspond to 12 measurements of weight of animals between 8 and 19 months old, from the genetic groups of the races Nelore and Canchim, belonging to the genotype AALLAB (Paz 2002). The results reveal excellent applicability of the bayesian method, where the model of Richard presented difficulties of convergence both in the classical and in the bayesian approach (with non informative prior). On the other hand the logistic model provided the best adjustment of the data for both methodologies when opting for non informative and informative prior density.