Hypothesis Tests and Confidence Intervals Involving Fitness Landscapes fit by Aster Models

Abstract

This technical report explores some issues left open in Technical Reports 669 and 670 (Geyer and Shaw, 2008a,b): for fitness landscapes fit using an aster models, we propose hypothesis tests of whether the landscape has a maximum and confidence regions for the location of the maximum. All analyses are done in R (R Development Core Team, 2008) using the aster contributed package described by Geyer, Wagenius and Shaw (2007) and Shaw, Geyer, Wagenius, Hangelbroek, and Etterson (2008). Furthermore, all analyses are done using the Sweave function in R, so this entire technical report and all of the analyses reported in it are completely reproducible by anyone who has R with the aster package installed and the R noweb file specifying the document. The revision fixes one error in the confidence ellipsoids in Section 4 (a square root was forgotten so the regions in the original were too big).