An evaluation of the efficiency of plant protection products via nonlinear statistical methods – a simulation study

A nonlinear statistical approach was used to evaluate the efficiency of plant protection products. The methodology presented can be implemented when the observations in an experiment are recorded as success or failure. This occurs, for example, when following the application of a herbicide or pesticide, a single weed or insect is classified as alive (failure) or dead (success). Then a higher probability of success means a higher efficiency of the tested product. Using simulated data sets, a comparison was made of three methods based on the logit, probit and threshold models, with special attention to the effect of sample size and number of replications on the accuracy of the estimation of probabilities.