Consequences of assuming an incorrect error structure in von Bertalanffy growth models: a simulation study
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The underlying sources of growth variability in a population cannot generally be known, so when modelling growth it is important to understand the consequences of assuming an incorrect error structure. In this study, four error models for a von Bertalanffy growth curve with asymptotic length parameter L ∞ and growth rate parameter k are considered. Simulations are carried out in which data are generated according to one of the models and fitted assuming each of the models to be true. This is done for two types of data: direct age–length and tag–recapture. For direct age–length data, the consequences of not accounting for individual growth variability, or assuming the wrong source of variability, are minor, even when individual variability is high or data coverage is poor. For tag–recapture data, some substantial biases in growth estimates can arise when individual variability exists but is not accounted for. Importantly, however, incorporating variability in just one parameter (be it L ∞ or k), even if the variability truly stems from the other or both parameters, generally leads to much smaller biases than assuming no individual variability. Often the alternative models cannot be distinguished using standard model selection procedures, so caution is warranted in using model selection to draw inferences about underlying sources of growth variability.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it