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Relatedness disequilibrium regression explained

August 13, 2018

Whether resemblance between relatives is due to genes (nature) or environment (including nurture) has generated much controversy, especially for traits like education and intelligence. The modern scientific effort to disentangle nature and nurture can be traced, in large part, back to Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Prompted by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, … More Relatedness disequilibrium regression explained

RDR and rare variants

November 15, 2017

I am writing this post to answer some of the reactions I got to my recent article on ‘Estimating heritability without environmental bias‘, in which I develop a novel method, RDR, to estimate heritability, and apply it to 14 human traits. RDR uses IBD segments to infer heritability. RDR therefore handles rare variants similarly to … More RDR and rare variants

Heritability estimation: the central problem (ii)

October 9, 2017

In the first part of this series of blog posts, I gave my definition of heritability. I defined heritability as the fraction of trait variability explained by direct genetic effects alone. Direct genetic effects are the effect of genetic variants in a body on that body. They are distinguished from indirect genetic effects, which are … More Heritability estimation: the central problem (ii)

My talk at Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor (2015) on using an efficient heteroskedastic linear mixed model to find loci involved in interactions in genome-wide association studies.