Transformation of Data in Agricultural Research

Data transformation is the most appropriate remedial measure in the situation where the variances are heterogeneous and are some functions of means. With this technique, the original data are converted to a new scale resulting into a new data set that is expected to satisfy the homogeneity of variances. Because a common transformation scale is applied to all observations, the comparative values between treatments are not altered and comparison between them remains valid. Error partitioning is the remedial measure of heterogeneity that usually occurs in experiments, where, due to the nature of treatments tested some treatments have errors that are substantially higher (lower) than others. In the present chapter, we discussed the most commonly used data transformation techniques with real world examples.