The aim of the present study was to fit the weight-age of 152 Hereford cattle male. The fitting has been done by the ordinary least square (OLS), weighted least square (WLS), generalized weighted least square with autoregressive errors, first (GWLS-AR1) and second (GWLS-AR2) orders. The WEIGHT and %AR options of MODEL procedure, available in the software Statistical Analysis System (SAS), was used to fit the data. Models were evaluated by the following measures of quality: convergence percentage, error mean square, adjusted determination coefficient and mean predicted error. The Gompertz and von Bertalanffy models fitted by WLS, GWLS-AR1 and GWLS-AR2 methods were indicated to describe the growth of animals up to two years old.
growth curve; Hereford cattle; heterocedasticity; residual autocorrelation