“Applications of Index Selection”, 1997-08-04 (; backlinks; similar):
The first topic, which consists of the bulk of this chapter, is using index selection to improve a single trait. One can have a number of measures of the same trait in either relatives of a focal individual or as multiple measures of the same trait in a single individual, or both. How does one best use this information? We start by developing the general theory for using an index to improve the response in a single trait (which follows as a simplification of the Smith-Hazel index). We then apply these results to several important cases—a general analysis when either phenotypic or genotypic correlations are zero, improving response using repeated measurements of a characters over time, and using information from relatives to improve response with a special focus on combined selection (the optimal weighting of individual and family information, proving many of the details first presented in Chapter 17). As we will see in Chapter 35, the mixed-model power of BLUP provides a better solution to many of these problems, but index selection is both historically important as well as providing clean analytic results.
In contrast to the first topic, the final 3 are essentially independent of each other and we try to present them as such (so that the reader can simply turn to the section of interest without regard to previous material in this chapter). They include selection on a ratio, selection on sex-specific and sexually-dimorphic traits, and finally selection on the environmental variance σ^2E when it shows heritable variation (expanding upon results from Chapter 13).
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