Epistasis and Entropy

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the use of shared entropy as an indicator of epistasis, revealing its limitations and proposing a refined approach for identifying pairwise genetic interactions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that shared entropy can be misleading for detecting epistasis and introduces a more accurate method for identifying pairwise interactions.

Findings

Shared entropy does not necessarily indicate epistasis.

Shared entropy can be misleading even without higher order epistasis.

A refined entropy-based approach improves detection of pairwise interactions.

Abstract

Epistasis is a key concept in the theory of adaptation. Indicators of epistasis are of interest for large system where systematic fitness measurements may not be possible. Some recent approaches depend on information theory. We show that considering shared entropy for pairs of loci can be misleading. The reason is that shared entropy does not imply epistasis for the pair. This observation holds true also in the absence of higher order epistasis. We discuss a refined approach for identifying pairwise interactions using entropy.