On Negative Heritability and Negative Estimates of Heritability | Zendy

David Steinsaltz | Zendy; Andy Dahl | Zendy; Kenneth W. Wachter | Zendy

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On Negative Heritability and Negative Estimates of Heritability

Author(s) -

David Steinsaltz,

Andy Dahl,

Kenneth W. Wachter

Publication year - 2020

Publication title -

genetics

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 2.792

H-Index - 246

eISSN - 1943-2631

pISSN - 0016-6731

DOI - 10.1534/genetics.120.303161

Subject(s) - heritability , biology , missing heritability problem , variation (astronomy) , statistics , genetics , econometrics , evolutionary biology , mathematics , genetic variants , gene , genotype , physics , astrophysics

We consider the problem of interpreting negative maximum likelihood estimates of heritability that sometimes arise from popular statistical models of additive genetic variation. These may result from random noise acting on estimates of genuinely positive heritability, but we argue that they may also arise from misspecification of the standard additive mechanism that is supposed to justify the statistical procedure. Researchers should be open to the possibility that negative heritability estimates could reflect a real physical feature of the biological process from which the data were sampled.

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