Use of the Multinomial Dirichlet Model for Analysis of Subdivided Genetic Populations

C. J. Jiang ¹ and C. Clark Cockerham ¹

¹ Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695-8203

The distribution found by compounding the multinomial distribution with the Dirichlet distribution has been suggested as a basis for the estimation of parameters in subdivided populations, in particular of the "correlation between genotypes" within subpopulations. It is shown that the estimators deriving from these procedures perform poorly when the data are generated by the classical Wright drift model of subdivided populations. This conclusion suggests that the compound distribution estimation approach does not provide a good estimation procedure for real populations which are reasonably described by the Wright model.