Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium Module

The usage of the standalone module is shown below:

$ pyGenClean_flag_hw --help
usage: pyGenClean_flag_hw [-h] [-v] --bfile FILE [--hwe FLOAT] [--out FILE]

Flags SNPs with Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -v, --version  show program's version number and exit

Input File:
  --bfile FILE   The input file prefix (will find the plink binary files by
                 appending the prefix to the .bim, .bed and .fam files,
                 respectively.

Options:
  --hwe FLOAT    The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium threshold. [default: 1e-4]

Output File:
  --out FILE     The prefix of the output files. [default: flag_hw]

Input Files

This module uses PLINK’s binary file format (bed, bim and fam files) for the source data set (the data of interest).

Procedure

Here are the steps performed by the module:

  1. Computes the number of markers in the input file.
  2. Computes the Bonferroni threshold.
  3. Runs Plink to find failed markers for HWE with the Bonferroni threshold.
  4. Runs Plink to find failed markers for HWE with the default threshold.
  5. Compares the two marker lists (Bonferroni and default threshold) and finds markers that are between the two thresholds.

Output Files

The output files of each of the steps described above are as follow (note that the output prefix shown is the one by default [i.e. flag_hw]):

  1. No files are created for this step.
  2. No files are created for this step.
  3. One set of PLINK’s binary file is created:
    • flag_hw.threshold_X.Xe-X: the data set containing only the markers that pass the HWE test (above the Bonferroni threshold).
  4. One set of PLINK’s binary file is created:
    • flag_hw.threshold_1e-4: the data set containing only the markers that pass the HWE test (above the genome wide significance threshold of \(1 \times 10^{-4}\)). This value can be modified at the command line.
  5. Three files are created:
    • flag_hw.snp_flag_threshold_X.Xe-X: the list of markers that failed HWE test for the Bonferroni threshold.
    • flag_hw.snp_flag_threshold_1e-4: the list of markers that failed HWE test for the genome wide significance threshold of \(1 \times 10^{-4}\). This value can be modified at the command line.
    • flag_hw.snp_flag_threshold_between_1e-4-X.Xe-X: the list of markers that failed HWE test at a threshold between the Bonferroni and the genome wide significance thresholds, so that you can exclude only the ones that have a lower p value than the Bonferroni threshold.

The Algorithm

For more information about the actual algorithms and source codes, refer to the following page.