Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, OX1 3TG, United Kingdom
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, California, 94143
Genetics. 2020 Jun;215(2):343-357. doi: 10.1534/genetics.120.303161. Epub 2020 Apr 14.
We consider the problem of interpreting negative maximum likelihood estimates of heritability that sometimes arise from popular statistical models of additive genetic variation. These may result from random noise acting on estimates of genuinely positive heritability, but we argue that they may also arise from misspecification of the standard additive mechanism that is supposed to justify the statistical procedure. Researchers should be open to the possibility that negative heritability estimates could reflect a real physical feature of the biological process from which the data were sampled.
我们考虑了从加性遗传变异的流行统计模型中有时会出现的负遗传力最大似然估计的解释问题。这些可能是由于对真正正遗传力的估计受到随机噪声的影响,但我们认为,它们也可能是由于标准加性机制的指定不当而导致的,而这种机制应该是统计程序的基础。研究人员应该对这样一种可能性持开放态度,即负遗传力估计可能反映了数据采样的生物过程的真实物理特征。