New insights into the usefulness of robust singular value decomposition in statistical genetics
          Rodrigues, Paulo C.; Monteiro, Andreia; Lourenço, Vanda  
          
          Proceedings of the 21st  International Conference on Computational Statistics (COMPSTAT 2014),  (2014), 53-59  
          http://compstat2014.org/auxil/Proceedings-COMPSTAT2014.pdf  
           
          The distribution of continuous real life variables is usually not normal and plant
 phenotypes are no exception to the rule. These distributions often show heavy tails which
 are sometimes asymmetric. In such scenarios, the classical approach whose likelihood-based
 inference leans on the normality assumption may be inappropriate, having low statistical e-
 ciency. Moreover, association tests may also be underpowered. Robust statistical methods are
 designed to accommodate for certain data deciencies, allowing for reliable results under various
 conditions. They are designed to be resistant to in
 uent factors as outlying observations,
 non-normality and other model misspecications. Additionally, if the model veries the classical
 assumptions, robust methods provide results close to the classical ones. Therefore, a new
 methodology where robust statistical methods replace the classic ones to model, structure and
 analyse genotype-by-environment interactions in the context of multi-location plant breeding
 trials, is presented. Here interest lies in the development of a robust version of the additive main
 eects and multiplicative interaction model whose performance is compared with its classical
 version. This is achieved through Monte Carlo simulations where one particular contamination
 scheme is considered.  
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