Analysis of a longitudinal multilevel experiment using GAMLSSs

The standard procedures for analysing hierarquical or grouped data are by (non)linear mixed models or generalized mixed models. However, the generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSSs) also allow different types of random effects to be included in the model formulation. Even though already popular in many areas of research, this type of models have not been found to be used for mixed modeling purposes yet. Therefore, this paper describes the analysis of an experiment with plants' growth using mixed GAMLSSs, comparing it to a linear mixed model approach.