An asymptotically normal test for the selective neutrality hypothesis

DOI10.1214/193940307000000293MaRDI QIDQ6209557zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Aluísio Pinheiro, Hildete P. Pinheiro, Samara F. Kiihl

Publication date 16 May 2008

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1214/193940307000000293

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Nonparametric hypothesis testing (62G10) Asymptotic properties of nonparametric inference (62G20) Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10)

Abstract: An important parameter in the study of population evolution is $heta=4Nu$, where $N$ is the effective population size and $u$ is the rate of mutation per locus per generation. Therefore, $heta$ represents the mean number of mutations per site per generation. There are many estimators of $heta$, one of them being the mean number of pairwise nucleotide differences, which we call $mathcal{T}_2$. Other estimators are $mathcal{T}_1$, based on the number of segregating sites and $mathcal{T}_3$, based on the number of singletons. The concept of selective neutrality can be interpreted as a differentiated nucleotide distribution for mutant sites when compared to the overall nucleotide distribution. Tajima (1989) has proposed the so-called Tajima's test of selective neutrality based on $mathcal{T}_2-mathcal{T}_1$. Its complex empirical behavior (Kiihl, 2005) motivates us to propose a test statistic solely based on $mathcal{T}_2$. We are thus able to prove asymptotic normality under different assumptions on the number of sequences and number of sites via $U$-statistics theory.

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