Two concurrent workshops will be held before the AASC 2004 conference on Monday 2nd September 2024 at the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle. Workshops will be held 9am - 1pm and run concurrently.

Registration for the workshops can be completed via the registration page, either combined with conference registration, or separately. Workshop registration includes morning tea and lunch.

Recent developments in design and analysis of experiments in plant breeding and variety testing based on linear mixed models

Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Piepho, University of Hohenheim

This workshop will consider statistical issues arising in the design and analysis of experiments in plant breeding and variety testing, focusing on recent developments in the field. I will start by considering individual trials and then will move on to the integration of trials across multiple environments, where modelling of genotype-environment interaction is required.

Topics covered for individual trials will include a model-free approach to generating efficient designs, two-phase experimental designs, the use of post-blocking in assessing the merits of alternative designs, recovery of inter-block information, and spatial analysis. In relation to multiple environment trials, I will consider, e.g., sparse testing, the optimal allocation of trials to agro-ecological zones, variance-covariance structures for modelling genotype-environment interaction, the use of environmental covariates to enhance predictions and recommendations, assessment of long-term trends and genetic gain, and two-stage versus single-stage analysis.

Areas of interest:

Person

Hans-Peter Piepho was appointed Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany in 2001. He has been working as an applied statistician in agricultural research for more than 30 years. His main interests are related to statistical procedures as needed in plant genetics, plant breeding and cultivar testing. Recent interests include envirotype- and marker-enabled breeding, spatial methods for field trials and experimental design for various applications including two-phase experiments and multi-environment trials. Further areas of interest include network meta-analysis and measure of goodness of fit for generalized linear mixed models.

Reliable and Reproducible Analysis with Genstat

Dr. Roger Payne, Dr. Vanessa Cave & Dr. David Baird, VSN

This workshop will explore how to move from menus to programs that can be rerun to reproduce the analysis. This includes extracting data from spreadsheet files and databases and producing PDFs containing tables, graphs, and text for clients.

As well as recap highlights of the last ten years of Genstat development, such as

The sessions will involve a mixture of examples and practicals, so please bring your laptops (ideally, with Genstat 23 already installed).

Roger Payne leads the development of Genstat at VSN, now working part-time after 15 years in the full-time role of VSN's Chief Science and Technology Officer. He has a degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from University of Cambridge, and is a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. Prior to joining VSN, Roger was a statistical consultant and researcher at Rothamsted, becoming their expert on design and analysis of experiments, as well as leader of their statistical computing activities. He originally took over the leadership of Genstat there in 1985 when John Nelder retired. His other statistical interests include generalized and hierarchical generalized linear models, linear mixed models, the study of efficient identification methods (with applications in particular to the identification of yeasts), and ornithological applications.

Dr. Vanessa Cave is an applied statistician interested in the application of statistics to the biosciences, in particular agriculture, animal science and ecology, and is a developer of the Genstat statistical software package. She has 20 years of experience collaborating with scientists, using statistics to solve real-world problems. Vanessa provides expertise on experiment and survey design, data collection and management, statistical analysis, and the interpretation of statistical findings. Her interests include statistical consultancy, mixed models, multivariate methods, statistical ecology, statistical graphics and data visualisation.

Vanessa is a past President of both the Australasian Region of the International Biometric Society and the New Zealand Statistical Association, on the Editorial Board of The New Zealand Veterinary Journal and an honorary academic at the University of Auckland. She has a PhD in statistics from the University of St Andrew.

David Baird is a statistical consultant based in Christchurch, New Zealand, with 40-years’ experience across a wide range of areas including agriculture, horticulture, ecology, biosecurity, and earthquakes. He has worked on Genstat for 30 years, developing the spreadsheet, menus, data exchange and graphics. He has contributed to 98 procedures in the areas of experimental design, spatial modelling, extreme values, data mining, quantile regression, exact statistics, microarrays, graphics, and data handling.