Accurate Computation of Likelihoods in the Coalescent with Recombination Via Parsimony

Understanding the variation of recombination rates across a given genome is crucial for disease gene mapping and for detecting signatures of selection, to name just a couple of applications. A widely-used method of estimating recombination rates is the maximum likelihood approach, and the problem of accurately computing likelihoods in the coalescent with recombination has received much attention in the past. A variety of sampling and approximation methods have been proposed, but no single method seems to perform consistently better than the rest, and there still is great value in developing better statistical methods for accurately computing likelihoods. So far, with the exception of some twolocus models, it has remained unknown how the true likelihood exactly behaves as a function of model parameters, or how close estimated likelihoods are to the true likelihood. In this paper, we develop a deterministic, parsimony-based method of accurately computing the likelihood for multi-locus in...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: RECOMB
• Authors: Jotun Hein, Rune B. Lyngsø, Yun S. Song
• Keywords: Computational Biology, Disease Gene Mapping, Evolutionary Histories, Multi-locus Input Data, RECOMB 2008