mStruct: Inference of population structure in light of both genetic admixing and allele mutations

Abstract

Traditional methods for analysis of population structure mostly ignore the influence of mutational effects. We propose mStruct, a method to jointly infer population structure and estimation of mutational parameters. We develop mStruct as a mixed-membership model, in particular, as an admixture of population specific mixtures (of inheritance models). We also develop a variational algorithm for inference. We validated our method on synthetic data, and used it to analyze data from the Human Genome Diversity Project for microsatellites and SNP data. We compare the population structure results with Structure, a state-of-the art program for the task, and also report interesting patterns of mutation in modern world populations. This is joint work with Eric Xing

Bio

Venue, Date, and Time

Venue: NSH 1507

Date: Monday, April 28

Time: 12:00 noon

Slides