Back

Modelling complex population structure using F-statistics and Principal Component Analysis

Peter, B. M.

2021-07-13 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2021.07.13.452141 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Human genetic diversity is shaped by our complex history. Data-driven methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are an important population genetic tool to understand this method. Here, I contrast PCA with a set of statistics motivated by trees (F-statistics). Here, I show that these two methods are closely related, and I derive explicit connections between the two approaches. I show that F-statistics have a simple geometrical interpretation in the context of PCA, and that orthogonal projections are the key concept to establish this link. I illustrate my results on two examples, one of local, and one of global human diversity. In both examples, I find that just using the first few PCs provides good population structure is sparse, and only a few components contribute to most statistics. Based on these results, I develop novel visualizations that allow for investigating specific hypotheses, checking the assumptions of more sophisticated models. My results extend F-statistics to non-discrete populations, moving towards more complete and less biased descriptions of human genetic variation.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.