Related papers: How to estimate heritability, a guide for epidemio…

Some methods aim to correct or test for relationships or to reconstruct the pedigree, or family tree. We show that these methods cannot resolve ties for correct relationships due to identifiability of the pedigree likelihood which is the…

This paper studies fitness inheritance as an efficiency enhancement technique for a class of competent genetic algorithms called estimation distribution algorithms. Probabilistic models of important sub-solutions are developed to estimate…

Network sampling is used around the world for surveys of vulnerable, hard-to-reach populations including people at risk for HIV, opioid misuse, and emerging epidemics. The sampling methods include tracing social links to add new people to…

Estimating density ratios between pairs of intractable data distributions is a core problem in probabilistic modeling, enabling principled comparisons of sample likelihoods under different data-generating processes across conditions and…

For many practical problems, the regression models follow the strong heredity property (also known as the marginality), which means they include parent main effects when a second-order effect is present. Existing methods rely mostly on…

Large scale databases are available that contain homologous gene families constructed from hundreds of complete genome sequences from across the three domains of Life. Here we discuss approches of increasing complexity aimed at extracting…

There is an urgent and well-recognized need to extend genetic studies to diverse populations, but several obstacles continue to be prohibitive, including (but not limited to) the difficulty of recruiting individuals from diverse populations…

We propose a general approach to construct weighted likelihood estimating equations with the aim of obtain robust estimates. The weight, attached to each score contribution, is evaluated by comparing the statistical data depth at the model…

This article analyzes the problem of estimating the time until an event occurs, also known as survival modeling. We observe through substantial experiments on large real-world datasets and use-cases that populations are largely…

Persistent homology is a cornerstone of topological data analysis, offering a multiscale summary of topology with robustness to nuisance transformations, such as rotations and small deformations. Persistent homology has seen broad use…

To date, efforts to produce high-quality polygenic risk scores from genome-wide studies of common disease have focused on estimating and aggregating the effects of multiple SNPs. Here we propose a novel statistical approach for genetic risk…

There have been controversies among statisticians on (i) what to model and (ii) how to make inferences from models with unobservables. One such controversy concerns the difference between estimation methods for the marginal means not…

Phylogenetic analyses of gene expression have great potential for addressing a wide range of questions. These analyses will, for example, identify genes that have evolutionary shifts in expression that are correlated with evolutionary…

Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or…

In certain genetic studies, clinicians and genetic counselors are interested in estimating the cumulative risk of a disease for individuals with and without a rare deleterious mutation. Estimating the cumulative risk is difficult, however,…

There is growing interest in a hybrid control design in which a randomized controlled trial is augmented with an external control arm from a previous trial or real world data. Existing methods for analyzing hybrid control studies include…

Multiple default inheritance formalisms for lexicons have attracted much interest in recent years. I propose a new efficient method to access such lexicons. After showing two basic strategies for lookup in inheritance lexicons, a compromise…

This paper proposes a new measure of relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait as a proxy of inequality of opportunity. The new measure is more suitable for controlling for the variations in the trait distributions of…

Given samples from a distribution, how many new elements should we expect to find if we continue sampling this distribution? This is an important and actively studied problem, with many applications ranging from unseen species estimation to…

Recent publications have described and applied a novel metric that quantifies the genetic distance of an individual with respect to two population samples, and have suggested that the metric makes it possible to infer the presence of an…