[Basta-users] Brilliant, but..when birthday?.: out$lifetable errors

[Owen Jones]

Hi Cliff,

I don't understand why the next age of death would be 2. Perhaps I don't know enough about your data.

Anyway, it sounds like you might be better off fixing a minimum age to condition the model upon. e.g. add "minAge=1" as an argument to your model. The aim of this argument is to take account of the fact that you have no knowledge of the fate of very young individuals, and can only follow those that have reached a certain age.

In your case, the basta function will not produce a life table (since the individuals will be truncated), but the model (Gompertz) parameters will be estimated so you can see the trajectories. You could also use the MakeLifeTable function afterwards, as I described earlier, to produce a life table conditioned on individuals reaching that particular age.

Cheers,
Owen


On 7 Nov 2011, at 12:03, Cliff Cunningham wrote:

> Dear Owen,
> 
> 	That worked beautifully!
> 
> 	I seem to have a catch 22, however.  The first year these animals were marked was 1979.  If I put in 1979 as the  birthdate, then the first set of ages of death  is "zero", with the next age of death being "2"
> 
> 	When I input 1978 as the birthdate, then the first set of ages at death is "2", and counts up from there.  This seems OK, except I get all the error messages I mentioned before.
> 
> 	Thanks for the trouble.
> 	
> 	
> 	All the best!
> 
>    	Cliff Cunningham
> 
> 
>         Professor
> 	Biology Department
>     	Duke University
>         130 Science Drive
> 	Durham NC 27708
> 	Phone 919-660-7356
> 
> http://www.biology.duke.edu/cunningham
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 7, 2011, at 11:58 AM, Owen Jones wrote:
> 
>> MakeLifeTable(out$Xq[1,])
> 

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