FIXING MULTICOLLINEARITY INSTABILITY IN THE PREDICTION OF BODY WEIGHT FROM MORPHOMETRIC TRAITS OF WHITE FULANI COWS

Abstract

Body weight and nine morphostructural characters (withers height, rump height, heart girth, body length, head width,
cannon circumference, shoulder width, rump width and rump length) of 83 White Fulani cows aged 1.5-2.4 years old
were used to study the problem of multicollinearity instability in the estimation of body weight from morphological
indices. Pairwise phenotypic correlations indicated a high and positive significant relationship between body weight
and body dimensions (r = 0.61- 0.94; P<0.01). Among the linear type traits, the highest correlation was observed
between withers height and rump height (r =0.98) while the lowest value was recorded for rump height and shoulder
width (r =0.51). Severe collinearity problems were evident in 5 of the zoometrical variables as portrayed by variance
inflation factors (VIFs) higher than 10.00 (VIF = 33.096, 31.421, 24.612, 22.726 and 13.327 for rump height, withers
height, rump length, heart girth and body length respectively). Collinearity problems were further confirmed from the
computations of the eigenvalues of the correlation matrix, condition indexes and variance proportions. Heart girth was
retained among the collinear variables, and singly accounted for 87.9%, 92.3% and 94.1% of the variation in body
weight in the subsequent stepwise regression, quadratic and cubic models, respectively.