Nested hypotheses: an example in Genetics
Carlos Alberto de Bragança Pereira (USP)
Initial Comment: Treating nested hypotheses is an old important challenge to statisticians. To dramatize
the motivation we have chosen an important and common problem in population and human genetics. This talk
is based on the article by R. Izbicki, V. Fossaluza, A. G. Hounie, E. Y. Nakano, C. A. Pereira (2011),
Testing allele homogeneity: The problem of nested hypotheses, BMC Genetics 13:103.
Conclusions: The allelic and genotypic homogeneity test usually described in the literature shows
undesirable inconsistencies on its results. We show that even when using a proper frequentist procedure
to test allelic homogeneity these inconsistencies still occur. There are no flaws when e-values are used
instead. A routine that performs all tests considered in this paper in R Software can be downloaded on
www.ime.usp.br/~cpereira/programs/nested.r.
Keywords: Homogeneity test, FBST, Allele homogeneity, Chi-squared test, Bayesian Methods