RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Decomposing Multilocus Linkage Disequilibrium
JF Genetics
JO Genetics
FD Genetics Society of America
SP 1581
OP 1583
DO 10.1534/genetics.166.3.1581
VO 166
IS 3
A1 Gorelick, Root
A1 Laubichler, Manfred D.
YR 2004
UL http://www.genetics.org/content/166/3/1581.abstract
AB We present a mathematically precise formulation of total linkage disequilibrium between multiple loci as the deviation from probabilistic independence and provide explicit formulas for all higher-order terms of linkage disequilibrium, thereby combining J. Dausset et al.'s 1978 definition of linkage disequilibrium with H. Geiringer's 1944 approach. We recursively decompose higher-order linkage disequilibrium terms into lower-order ones. Our greatest simplification comes from defining linkage disequilibrium at a single locus as allele frequency at that locus. At each level, decomposition of linkage disequilibrium is mathematically equivalent to number theoretic compositions of positive integers; i.e., we have converted a genetic decomposition into a mathematical decomposition.