Models for strawberry inflorescence data

Abstract

The flowers of strawberry plants grow on very variable branched structures called inflorescences, in which each branch gives rise to 0, 1, or 2 offspring branches. We extend previous modeling of the number of strawberry flowers at each individual level in the inflorescence structure conditional on the number of strawberry flowers at the previous level. We consider a range of logistic regression models, including models that incorporate inflorescence effects and random effects. The models can be used to summarize the overall structure of any particular variety and to indicate the main differences between varieties. For the data of the article, we show that models based on convolutions of correlated Bernoulli random variables outperform binomial regression models.