We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
24/2018
New perspectives on multilocus ancestry informativeness
Omri Tal and Tat Dat Tran
Abstract
We present an axiomatic approach for multilocus informativeness measures for determining the amount of information that a set of polymorphic genetic markers provides about individual ancestry. We then reveal several surprising properties of a decision-theoretic based measure that is consistent with the set of proposed criteria for multilocus informativeness. In particular, these properties highlight the interplay between information originating from population priors and the information extractable from the population genetic variants. This analysis then reveals a certain deficiency of mutual information based multilocus informativeness measures when such population priors are incorporated. Finally, we analyse and quantify the inevitable inherent decrease in informativeness due to learning from finite population samples.
