STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
Tamar Sofer, PhD
Associate Biostatistician
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Assistant Professor
Harvard Medical School
Estimating heritability and genetic correlations with (interpretable) method
of moment estimators of variance components
Abstract
In genetic association studies, heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variance explained by genetic, and genetic correlation measures the correlation between the additive genetic components underlying two phenotypes. We develop and study moment estimators of heritability and genetic correlation and show that they are easily interpreted as generalizations of standard estimators of residual variance and Pearson correlation in datasets of independent individuals. I will provide examples from data analysis.
For more information, contact: Tracy Burke at tracy.burke@uconn.edu