Multitrait genetic evaluation of Jersey type with integrated accounting for heterogeneous (co) variances

February 1998, a multitrait animal model with canonical transformation was implemented for genetic evaluation of type traits for US Jerseys (Gengler et al., 1999). The method includes multiple diagonalization (Misztal et al., 1995), which is a generalization of canonical transformation to several random effects rather than only additive genetic effects; an expectation-maximization algorithm that permits the use of this approach even if observations for some traits are missing for some cows (Ducrocq and Besbes, 1993); and accounting for inbreeding in the construction of the additive genetic relationship matrix (Wiggans et al., 1995).