Local influence assessment in the growth curve model with unstructured covariance

In this paper, a local influence approach is employed to assess adequacy of the growth curve model with an unstructured covariance, based on likelihood displacement. The Hessian matrix of the model is investigated in detail under an abstract perturbation scheme. For illustration, covariance-weighted perturbation is discussed and used to analyze two real-life biological data sets, which show that the criteria presented in this article are useful in practice. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.