Title: Robust QTL analysis by minimum β-divergence method

Authors: Md. Nurul Haque Mollah, Shinto Eguchi

Addresses: The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, 4-6-7, Minami-Azabu, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 106-8569, Japan. ' The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, 4-6-7, Minami-Azabu, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 106-8569, Japan

Abstract: Robustness has received too little attention in Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) analysis in experimental crosses. This paper discusses a robust QTL mapping algorithm based on Composite Interval Mapping (CIM) model by minimising β-divergence using the EM like algorithm. We investigate the robustness performance of the proposed method in a comparison of Interval Mapping (IM) and CIM algorithms using both synthetic and real datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance over the traditional IM and CIM methods for QTL analysis in presence of outliers; otherwise, it keeps equal performance.

Keywords: QTL analysis; QTL mapping; quantitative trait loci; Gaussian mixture distribution; CIM; composite interval mapping; minimum beta-divergence; beta-LOD scores; robustness; bioinformatics; robustness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDMB.2010.034199

International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, 2010 Vol.4 No.4, pp.471 - 485

Published online: 17 Jul 2010 *

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