| Disease Gene Mapping in General (2009) | |||||||||||||||
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| Disease gene mapping is one of the main focuses of genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics. This dissertation explores some methods and algorithms in this area, especially in pedigrees. The first chapter gives an introduction to human genetics and disease gene mapping. Existing linkage and association methods are introduced and compared. Probabilities of genotypic data from multiple linked marker loci on related individuals are used as likelihoods of gene locations for gene-mapping, or as likelihoods of other parameters of interest in human genetics. With the recent development in genetics and molecular biology techniques, large-scale marker data has become available, which requires highly efficient likelihood calculations especially for complex pedigrees. Algorithms for likelihood calculations for pedigree data are reviewed in chapter 2. Besides exact likelihood calculation methods and MCMC, a Sequential Importance Sampling (SIS) approach has been proposed to enable calculations for large pedigrees with large numbers of markers. However, when the system gets large, the variance of the importance sampling weights increases while both efficiency and accuracy of the method decrease. We propose an optimization algorithm for calculating the likelihood of general | |||||||||||||||
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