Scaling probabilistic models of genetic variation to millions of humans.

Publication Year
2016

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

A major goal of population genetics is to quantitatively understand variation of genetic polymorphisms among individuals. The aggregated number of genotyped humans is currently on the order of millions of individuals, and existing methods do not scale to data of this size. To solve this problem, we developed TeraStructure, an algorithm to fit Bayesian models of genetic variation in structured human populations on tera-sample-sized data sets (10 observed genotypes; for example, 1 million individuals at 1 million SNPs). TeraStructure is a scalable approach to Bayesian inference in which subsamples of markers are used to update an estimate of the latent population structure among individuals. We demonstrate that TeraStructure performs as well as existing methods on current globally sampled data, and we show using simulations that TeraStructure continues to be accurate and is the only method that can scale to tera-sample sizes.

Journal
Nat Genet
Volume
48
Issue
12
Pages
1587-1590
Date Published
2016 Dec
ISSN Number
1546-1718
Alternate Journal
Nat Genet
PMCID
PMC5127768
PMID
27819665