Fig. 3

Effect of sample size on selection of most appropriate growth function for the underlying data. Each sample size (number of animals) was generated 10 times (synthetic dataset number) to mimic a Gompertzian growth behavior including measurement errors. For each growth function, Gompertz (Gomp), exponential (Exp), power (Pow) and logistic (Log), the RMSE value was determined for each individual sample within each dataset (e.g. dataset 2 and sample size 10). The relative frequency denotes how often each of the growth functions had the lowest RMSE value for an individual fit in each sample size group