

Preprint 24/2018
New perspectives on multilocus ancestry informativeness
Omri Tal and Tat Dat Tran
Contact the author: Please use for correspondence this email.
Submission date: 28. Feb. 2018 (revised version: March 2018)
Pages: 38
published in: Mathematical biosciences, 306 (2018), p. 60-81
DOI number (of the published article): 10.1016/j.mbs.2018.10.011
Bibtex
Download full preprint: PDF (1462 kB)
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.