Related papers: Quantitative Analysis of Genealogy Using Digitised…
Phylogenetic trees describe the evolutionary history of a group of present-day species from a common ancestor. These trees are typically reconstructed from aligned DNA sequence data. In this paper we analytically address the following…
A probabilistic reconstruction of genealogies in a polyploid population (from 2x to 4x) is investigated, by considering genetic data analyzed as the probability of allele presence in a given genotype. Based on the likelihood of all possible…
Statistical analysis of DNA mixtures is known to pose computational challenges due to the enormous state space of possible DNA profiles. We propose a Bayesian network representation for genotypes, allowing computations to be performed…
Family history is a major risk factor for many types of cancer. Mendelian risk prediction models translate family histories into cancer risk predictions based on knowledge of cancer susceptibility genes. These models are widely used in…
We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…
Migrations have played an important role in shaping the genetic diversity of human populations. Understanding genomic data thus requires careful modeling of historical gene flow. Here we consider the effect of relatively recent population…
The amount of sequence data obtained from ancient samples has dramatically expanded in the last decade, and so have the types of questions that can now be addressed using ancient DNA. In the field of human history, while ancient DNA has…
Molecular phylogeny has focused mainly on improving models for the reconstruction of gene trees based on sequence alignments. Yet, most phylogeneticists seek to reveal the history of species. Although the histories of genes and species are…
We linked names and contact information to publicly available profiles in the Personal Genome Project. These profiles contain medical and genomic information, including details about medications, procedures and diseases, and demographic…
The evolutionary edit distance between two individuals in a population, i.e., the amount of applications of any genetic operator it would take the evolutionary process to generate one individual starting from the other, seems like a…
Most genes are part of larger families of evolutionary related genes. The history of gene families typically involves duplications and losses of genes as well as horizontal transfers into other organisms. The reconstruction of detailed gene…
In molecular phylogeny, relationships among organisms are reconstructed using DNA or protein sequences and are displayed as trees. A linear increase in the number of sequences results in an exponential increase of possible trees. Thus,…
Genotyping errors are known to influence the power of both family-based and case-control studies in the genetics of complex disease. Estimating genotyping error rate in a given dataset can be complex, but when family information is…
There is little debate about the importance of the ancestral recombination graph in population genetics. An important theoretical tool, the main obstacle to its widespread usage is the computational cost required to match the…
The process by which new communities emerge is a central research issue in the social sciences. While a growing body of research analyzes the formation of a single community by examining social networks between individuals, we introduce a…
Identifying the risk factors for mental illnesses is of significant public health importance. Diagnosis, stigma associated with mental illnesses, comorbidity, and complex etiologies, among others, make it very challenging to study mental…
Computational social scientists often harness the Web as a "societal observatory" where data about human social behavior is collected. This data enables novel investigations of psychological, anthropological and sociological research…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
The prediction of phenotypic traits using high-density genomic data has many applications such as the selection of plants and animals of commercial interest; and it is expected to play an increasing role in medical diagnostics. Statistical…
Familial Searching is the process of searching in a DNA database for relatives of a certain individual. It is well known that in order to evaluate the genetic evidence in favour of a certain given form of relatedness between two…