Performance of the No-U-Turn sampler in multi-trait variance component estimation using genomic data.

The accuracies of variance components and breeding values estimates for a multi-trait animal model using NUTS with the LKJ prior were equal to or higher than those obtained with restricted maximum likelihood or Gibbs sampling. Therefore, when the population size is small, NUTS with an LKJ prior could be an alternative sampling method for multi-trait analysis in animal breeding.