Robust estimation of heritability and predictive accuracy in plant breeding: evaluation using simulation and empirical data.

The proposed robust approach enhances the predictive accuracy of heritability and genomic prediction by minimizing the deleterious effects of outliers for a broad range of simulation scenarios and empirical breeding datasets. Accordingly, plant breeders should seriously consider regularly using the robust alongside the classical approach and increasing the number of replicates to three or more, to further enhance the accuracy of the robust approach.