Statistics Seminar: The Method of Limits and The Analysis of Count Data in Genome-wide Association Studies

We propose a new method of statistical inference, called the method of limits (MoL), which may be viewed as an extension of the method of moments. We establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the MoL estimator of heritability from GWAS data, which is seen as an advantage over the existing PQLseq method. Furthermore, we derived a consistent estimator of the proportion of causal SNPs. We also illustrate the usefulness of MoL through its application to the UK Biobank data to infer the heritability of week champagne consumption and week red wine consumption using the count data. This work is joint with Leqi Xu, Yiliang Zhang and Hongyu Zhao of Yale University.

Speaker: Professor Jiming Jiang, Department of Statistics, University of California, Davis
Professor Jiming Jiang website: https://statistics.ucdavis.edu/people/jiming-jiang