Simulating contests to determine the relative importance of correlated traits on the winning chances

In intraspecific agonistic interactions, it is expected that traits that are more important in determining the winning chances should exhibit greater differences between winners and losers than traits that are less important. However, several of the traits used to determine the winning chances are correlated. When these traits vary in their importance to win, it becomes hard (if not impossible) to disentangle an effect due to trait correlation from the true effect of each trait on winning. To test the impact of trait correlation on the relative importance of each trait on winning chances, we developed an individual-based simulation model that investigates how different values of trait correlation and the relative importance of each trait impact the expression of trait differences between winners and losers. The simulation was made in R and generates traits according to a normal distribution. Traits are correlated with each other through the function rnorm_multi. In each iteration, the v..., , , #### The stochastic model of agonistic interactions regarding `code1.R`

This is an individual-based simulation model, in which we establish scenarios combining different levels of correlation between attributes and their relative importance in determining Fighting Capacity. This model was used to investigate emerging patterns of differences between winners and losers for each attribute involved in the fight.

The correlated attributes used to exemplify the system were **body size** and **weapon size**.

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#### Setting up the environment

These packages were used:

* `faux`
* `dplyr`
* `tidyverse`
* `boot`
* `sciplot`
* `ggplot2`
* `ggthemes`
* `devtools`

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#### Main function

The main function is called **`simulation`**.

Its parameters are:

* `cor.weapon.body`: the value of the correlation between the traits weapon and body
* `weapon.imp`: the relative importance of the weapon size trait for the chance of winning a contest
* `body.imp`: the relative importance of the body size...,