Related papers: Multiple-line inference of selection on quantitati…
Many biological phenomena undergo developmental changes in time and space. Functional mapping, which is aimed at mapping genes that affect developmental patterns, is instrumental for studying the genetic architecture of biological changes.…
Multilevel selection occurs when short-term individual-level reproductive interests conflict with longer-term group-level fitness effects. Detecting and quantifying this phenomenon is key to understanding evolution of traits ranging from…
Studies of the genetic loci that contribute to variation in gene expression frequently identify loci with broad effect on gene expression: expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) hotspots. We describe a set of exploratory graphical…
Models for genome-wide prediction and association studies usually target a single phenotypic trait. However, in animal and plant genetics it is common to record information on multiple phenotypes for each individual that will be genotyped.…
We consider the Moran model of population genetics with two types, mutation, and selection, and investigate the line of descent of a randomly-sampled individual from a contemporary population. We trace this ancestral line back into the…
Recent methodological advances are enabling better examination of speciation and extinction processes and patterns. A major open question is the origin of large discrepancies in species number between groups of the same age. Existing…
Inferring concerted changes among biological traits along an evolutionary history remains an important yet challenging problem. Besides adjusting for spurious correlation induced from the shared history, the task also requires sufficient…
Multi-model inference covers a wide range of modern statistical applications such as variable selection, model confidence set, model averaging and variable importance. The performance of multi-model inference depends on the availability of…
Our work is motivated by and illustrated with application of association networks in computational biology, specifically in the context of gene/protein regulatory networks. Association networks represent systems of interacting elements,…
Variable selection has played a critical role in modern statistical learning and scientific discoveries. Numerous regularization and Bayesian variable selection methods have been developed in the past two decades for variable selection, but…
Microarray data are often used to determine which genes are differentially expressed between groups, for example, between treatment and control groups. There are methods of determining which genes have a high probability of differential…
Mapping expression Quantitative Trait Loci (eQTLs) represents a powerful and widely-adopted approach to identifying putative regulatory variants and linking them to specific genes. Up to now eQTL studies have been conducted in a relatively…
A data analysis pipeline is a structured sequence of steps that transforms raw data into meaningful insights by integrating various analysis algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical test to assess the significance of data…
Molecular traits, such as gene expression levels or protein binding affinities, are increasingly accessible to quantitative measurement by modern high-throughput techniques. Such traits measure molecular functions and, from an evolutionary…
Understanding which phenotypic traits are consistently correlated throughout evolution is a highly pertinent problem in modern evolutionary biology. Here, we propose a multivariate phylogenetic latent liability model for assessing the…
For the vast majority of genome wide association studies (GWAS) published so far, statistical analysis was performed by testing markers individually. In this article we present some elementary statistical considerations which clearly show…
Natural selection acts on traits at different scales, often with opposing consequences. This article identifies the particular forces that act at each scale and how those forces combine to determine the overall evolutionary outcome. A…
Mutations in a microbial population can increase the frequency of a genotype not only by increasing its exponential growth rate, but also by decreasing its lag time or adjusting the yield (resource efficiency). The contribution of multiple…
Heritability is a central parameter in quantitative genetics, both from an evolutionary and a breeding perspective. For plant traits heritability is traditionally estimated by comparing within and between genotype variability. This approach…
When dealing with subjective, noisy, or otherwise nebulous features, the "wisdom of crowds" suggests that one may benefit from multiple judgments of the same feature on the same object. We give theoretically-motivated `feature…