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Background: A wide range of diseases show some degree of clustering in families; family history is therefore an important aspect for clinicians when making risk predictions. Familial aggregation is often quantified in terms of a familial…
Sex difference in allele frequency is an emerging topic that is critical to our understanding of ascertainment bias, as well as data quality particularly of the largely overlooked X chromosome. To detect sex difference in allele frequency…
The selection pressures that have shaped the evolution of complex traits in humans remain largely unknown, and in some contexts highly contentious, perhaps above all where they concern mean trait differences among groups. To date, the…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
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…
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…
Repetitions within a given genealogical tree provides some information about the degree of consanguineity of a population. They can be analyzed with techniques usually employed in statistical physics when dealing with fixed point…
In a population with haploid reproduction any individual has a single parent in the previous generation. If all genealogical distances among pairs of individuals (generations from the closest common ancestor) are known it is possible to…
Partial clonality is widespread across the tree of life, but most population genetics models are designed for exclusively clonal or sexual organisms. This gap hampers our understanding of the influence of clonality on evolutionary…
Cryptic genetic sequences have attenuated effects on phenotypes. In the classic view, relaxed selection allows cryptic genetic diversity to build up across individuals in a population, providing alleles that may later contribute to…
Collecting genomics data across multiple heterogeneous populations (e.g., across different cancer types) has the potential to improve our understanding of disease. Despite sequencing advances, though, resources often remain a constraint…
Pervasive natural selection can strongly influence observed patterns of genetic variation, but these effects remain poorly understood when multiple selected variants segregate in nearby regions of the genome. Classical population genetics…
Recent work reports disparate performance for intersectional racial groups across face recognition tasks: face verification and identification. However, the definition of those racial groups has a significant impact on the underlying…
Recurrent mutations are a common phenomenon in population genetics. They may be at the origin of the fixation of a new genotype, if they give a phenotypic advantage to the carriers of the new mutation. In this paper, we are interested in…
Genetic studies of human traits have revolutionized our understanding of the variation between individuals, and opened the door for numerous breakthroughs in biology, medicine and other scientific fields. And yet, the ultimate promise of…
Heterozygote disadvantage is potentially a potent driver of population genetic divergence. Also referred to as underdominance, this phenomena describes a situation where a genetic heterozygote has a lower overall fitness than either…
In many large multiple testing problems the hypotheses are divided into families. Given the data, families with evidence for true discoveries are selected, and hypotheses within them are tested. Neither controlling the error-rate in each…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…
For measuring the strength of visually-observed subpopulation differences, the Population Difference Criterion is proposed to assess the statistical significance of visually observed subpopulation differences. It addresses the following…
Additive genetic variance in natural populations is commonly estimated using mixed models, in which the covariance of the genetic effects is modeled by a genetic similarity matrix derived from a dense set of markers. An important but…