New Equivalence Tests for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium and Multiple Alleles

TL;DR

This paper introduces new statistical tests for assessing Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium with multiple alleles, providing asymptotic and bootstrap methods, and evaluates their performance on real and simulated data.

Contribution

It proposes two novel test statistics for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium with multiple alleles, including their asymptotic distribution and bootstrap estimation methods.

Findings

Tests can be performed using asymptotic approximation or bootstrap.

The tests are applicable to real data sets and show good finite sample performance.

Simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tests.

Abstract

We consider testing equivalence to Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium in case of multiple alleles. Two different test statistics are proposed for this test problem. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistics is derived. The corresponding tests can be carried out using asymptotic approximation. Alternatively, the variance of the test statistics can be estimated by the bootstrap method. The proposed tests are applied to three real data sets. The finite sample performance of the tests is studied by simulations, which are inspired by the real data sets.