Activity Number:
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164
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Type:
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Invited
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Date/Time:
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Tuesday, August 13, 2002 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
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Sponsor:
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Section on Statistical Computing*
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Abstract - #300194 |
Title:
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Parentage Analysis: Strategies for Modeling and Computation
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Author(s):
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Beatrix Jones*+
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Affiliation(s):
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Pennsylvania State University
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Address:
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311 Thomas Building, University Park, Pennsylvania, 16802, USA
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Keywords:
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Genetics ; Fertility ; Dispersal
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Abstract:
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The revolution in genetic typing technology has produced the ability to collect data which are potentially very informative about ecological and evolutionary processes. Many questions about fertility and dispersal in natural populations would be easy inference problems if parent-child relationships were known with certainty. Parentage analysis addresses these problems when relationships are not known with certainty but informative genetic information is available. This talk will advocate a parentage analysis approach that focuses not on inferring relationships, but on modeling and inference for the demographic processes of interest (e.g., mating and offspring dispersal). The likelihood for these parameters is a sum over possible parent assignments for the offspring in the population, where each summand is weighted by the likelihood of the observed genetic information under that set of parent assignments. Computational techniques such as importance sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo then enable inference in either Bayesian or maximum likelihood frameworks. The talk will be illustrated with examples from plant and insect populations.
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