# Simulating shared segments between relatives

A few months ago I saw this nice figure from Amy Williams of the number of DNA segments that are expected to be shared between relatives. I thought it would be fun to simulate segment sharing with AlphaSimR.

Because DNA comes in chromosomes that don’t break up and recombine that much, the shared DNA between relatives tends to come in long chunks — segments that are identical by descent. The distribution of segment lengths can sometimes be used to tell apart relationships that would otherwise give the same average (e.g., Yengo et al. 2019, Qiao et al. 2021).

But let’s not do anything sophisticated. Instead, we take three very simple pedigrees — anyone who’s taken introductory genetics will recognize these ones — and look at relationships between full-sibs, half-sibs and cousins. We’ll also look at the inbred offspring of matings between full-sibs, half-sibs and cousins to see that the proportion that they share between their two copies of the genome lines up with the expected inbreeding.

There won’t be any direct comparison to the values that Williams’ simulation, because it simulated more distant relationships than this, starting with cousins and then moving further away. This is probably more interesting, especially for human genealogical genetics.

The code is on GitHub if you wants to follow along.

# The pedigrees

Here are the three pedigrees, drawn with the kinship2 package:

A pedigree, here, is really a table of individuals, where each column tells us their identifier, their parents, and optionally their sex, like this:

id, mother, father, sex
1, NA, NA, M
2, NA, NA, F
3, NA, NA, M
4, 2, 1, F
5, 2, 1, M
6, NA, NA, F
7, 4, 3, M
8, 6, 5, F
9, 8, 7, F

We can use GeneticsPed to check the relatedness and inbreeding if we don’t trust that I’ve entered the pedigrees right.

library(GeneticsPed)
library(purrr)

inbreeding_ped <- function(ped) {

inbreeding(Pedigree(ped))

}

print(map(list(ped_fullsib, ped_halfsib, ped_cousin), inbreeding_ped))

[[1]]
1    2    3    4    5
0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.25

[[2]]
1     2     3     4     5     6
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.125

[[3]]
1      2      3      4      5      6      7      8      9
0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0625

# Comparing haplotypes

We need some functions to compare haplotypes and individuals:

library(AlphaSimR)
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
library(tibble)

## Find shared segments between two haplotypes expressed as vectors
## map is a vector of marker positions

compare_haplotypes <- function(h1, h2, map) {
sharing <- h1 == h2

runs <- rle(sharing)
end <- cumsum(runs$lengths) start <- c(1, end[-length(end)] + 1) segments <- tibble(start = start, end = end, start_pos = map[start], end_pos = map[end], segment_length = end_pos - start_pos, value = runs$values)

segments[segments$value,] }  We will have haplotypes of the variants that go together on a chromosome, and we want to find segments that are shared between them. We do this with a logical vector that tests each variant for equality, and then use the rle to turn this into run-length encoding. We extract the start and end position of the runs and then keep only the runs of equality. Building on that function, we want to find the shared segments on a chromosome between two individuals. That is, we make all the pairwise comparisons between the haplotypes they carry and combine them. ## Find shared segments between two individuals (expressed as ## matrices of haplotypes) for one chromosome compare_individuals_chr <- function(ind1, ind2, map) { h1_1 <- as.vector(ind1[1,]) h1_2 <- as.vector(ind1[2,]) h2_1 <- as.vector(ind2[1,]) h2_2 <- as.vector(ind2[2,]) sharing1 <- compare_haplotypes(h1_1, h2_1, map) sharing2 <- compare_haplotypes(h1_1, h2_2, map) sharing3 <- compare_haplotypes(h1_2, h2_1, map) sharing4 <- compare_haplotypes(h1_2, h2_2, map) bind_rows(sharing1, sharing2, sharing3, sharing4) }  Finally, we use that function to compare individuals along all the chromosomes. This function takes in a population and simulation parameter object from AlphaSimR, and two target individuals to be compared. We use AlphaSimR‘s pullIbdHaplo function to extract tracked founder haplotypes (see below) and then loop over chromosomes to apply the above comparison functions. ## Find shared segments between two target individuals in a ## population compare_individuals <- function(pop, target_individuals, simparam) { n_chr <- simparam$nChr

ind1_ix <- paste(target_individuals[1], c("_1", "_2"), sep = "")
ind2_ix <- paste(target_individuals[2], c("_1", "_2"), sep = "")

ibd <- pullIbdHaplo(pop,
simParam = simparam)

map <- simparam$genMap loci_per_chr <- map_dbl(map, length) chr_ends <- cumsum(loci_per_chr) chr_starts <- c(1, chr_ends[-n_chr] + 1) results <- vector(mode = "list", length = n_chr) for (chr_ix in 1:n_chr) { ind1 <- ibd[ind1_ix, chr_starts[chr_ix]:chr_ends[chr_ix]] ind2 <- ibd[ind2_ix, chr_starts[chr_ix]:chr_ends[chr_ix]] results[[chr_ix]] <- compare_individuals_chr(ind1, ind2, map[[chr_ix]]) results[[chr_ix]]$chr <- chr_ix
}

bind_rows(results)
}


(You might think it would be more elegant, when looping over chromosomes, to pull out the identity-by-descent data for each chromosome at a time. This won’t work on version 1.0.4 though, because of a problem with pullIbdHaplo which has been fixed in the development version.)

We use an analogous function to compare the haplotypes carried by one individual. See the details on GitHub if you’re interested.

# Building the simulation

We are ready to run our simulation: This code creates a few founder individuals that will initiate the pedigree, and sets up a basic simulation. The key simulation parameter is to set setTrackRec(TRUE) to turn on tracking of recombinations and founder haplotypes.

source("R/simulation_functions.R")

## Set up simulation

founders <- runMacs(nInd = 10,
nChr = 25)

simparam <- SimParam$new(founders) simparam$setTrackRec(TRUE)

founderpop <- newPop(founders,
simParam = simparam)


To simulate a pedigree, we use pedigreeCross, a built-in function to simulate a given pedigree, and then apply our comparison functions to the resulting simulated population.

## Run the simulation for a pedigree one replicate

simulate_pedigree <- function(ped,
target_individuals,
focal_individual,
founderpop,
simparam) {
pop <- pedigreeCross(founderPop = founderpop,
id = ped$id, mother = ped$mother,
father = ped$father, simParam = simparam) shared_parents <- compare_individuals(pop, target_individuals, simparam) shared_inbred <- compare_self(pop, focal_individual, simparam) list(population = pop, shared_segments_parents = shared_parents, shared_segments_self_inbred = shared_inbred) }  # Results First we can check how large proportion of the genome of our inbred individuals is shared between their two haplotypes, averaged over 100 replicates. That is, how much of the genome is homozygous identical by descent — what is their genomic inbreeding? It lines up with the expectation form pedigree: 0.25 for the half-sib pedigree, close to 0.125 for the full-sib pedigree and close to 0.0625 for the cousin pedigree. The proportion shared by the parents is, as it should, about double that.  case inbred_self_sharing parent_sharing full-sib 0.25 (0.052) 0.5 (0.041) half-sib 0.13 (0.038) 0.25 (0.029) cousin 0.064 (0.027) 0.13 (0.022)  Table of the mean proportion of genome shared between the two genome copies in inbred individuals and between their parents. Standard deviations in parentheses. This is a nice consistency check, but not really what we wanted. The point of explicitly simulating chromosomes and recombinations is to look at segments, not just total sharing. With a little counting and summarisation, we can plot the distributions of segment lengths. The horizontal axis is the length of the segments expressed in centimorgan. The vertical axis is the number of shared segments of this length or longer. Each line is a replicate. If we look at the summaries (table below), full-sibs share on average 74 segments greater than 1 cM in length, half-sibs 37, and cousins 29. In real data, short segments might be harder to detect, but because we’re using simulated fake data, we don’t have to worry about phasing errors or false positive sharing. If we look only at long segments (> 20 cM), full-sibs share on average 46 segments, half-sibs 23, and cousins 13. (Also, similar to Williams’ simulations, none of the cousins simulated here had less than five long segments shared.)  case 1 cM 10 cM 20 cM 30 cM 40 cM full-sib 74 (5.2) 60 (4.2) 46 (3.6) 34 (4) 24 (3.8) half-sib 37 (3.4) 30 (3.1) 23 (3.3) 17 (2.8) 13 (2.6) cousin 29 (3.8) 20 (3.3) 13 (3.2) 7.6 (2) 4.3 (1.8)  Table of the mean number of shared segments of different minimum length. Standard deviations in parentheses. We an also look at the average length of the segments shared, and note that while full-sibs and half-sibs differ in the number of segments, and total segment length shared (above), the length of individual segments is about the same:  case mean_length_sd full-sib 0.33 (0.032) half-sib 0.34 (0.042) cousin 0.21 (0.03)  Table of the mean length shared segments. Standard deviations in parentheses. # Limitations Williams’ simulation, using the ped-sim tool, had a more detailed model of recombination in the human genome, with different interference parameters for each chromosome, sex-specific recombination and so on. In that way, it is much more realistic. We’re not modelling any one genome in particular, but a very generic genome. Each chromosome is 100 cM long for example; one can imagine that a genome with many short chromosomes would give a different distribution. This can be changed, though; the chromosome size is the easiest, if we just pick a species. Literature Yengo, L., Wray, N. R., & Visscher, P. M. (2019). Extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample from the contemporary UK population. Nature communications, 10(1), 1-11. Qiao, Y., Sannerud, J. G., Basu-Roy, S., Hayward, C., & Williams, A. L. (2021). Distinguishing pedigree relationships via multi-way identity by descent sharing and sex-specific genetic maps. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 108(1), 68-83. # The hybrid online future Without making any predictions about what will happen with the pandemic or when, I suspect that we are never going back to the way things were in terms of on-campus education and meetings. A lot more of university life will be hybrid online. This isn’t because hybrid online is necessarily great; I suspect that in terms of meetings, a hybrid meeting with some folks in a room and others on videoconference is the worst of two worlds. But it might be the best option that is possible — when an in-person meeting is better than a hybrid meeting, but a hybrid meeting is better than no meeting. People get sick, at any time, and the prosocial thing to do is to stay at home and not spread the infection more than necessary. I expect, and hope, that this norm will remain, and we will have less people sick in class and at work. Students who fall ill will, reasonably, expect to be able to participate from home when they do the right thing and stay home from class. Teachers who suddenly fall ill likely expect it too. After all, it is less painful, for everyone involved, than cancelling and rescheduling. If we are reasonable and empathetic, we will accommodate. If I’m right that hybrid meetings are, in general, slightly worse than in person meetings, the meeting quality will on average be worse — but more people will be able to participate, and that is also valuable. So it might not feel like it, but taken together, the hybrid solution might be better. The exact balance would depend on how much worse or better different meeting forms are; we probably can’t put numbers on that. The same argument applies to online scientific conferences. I can’t imagine that the online conference experience is as useful, inspiring and conducive to networking as an in-person conference. My personal impression is that online conferences and seminars are great for watching talks, but bad for meeting people. However, online conferences are accessible to more people — those who for some reason can’t travel, can’t afford it, can’t be away from home for that long. We might not feel excited about it, but the hybrid online future is here. # 2021 blog recap Dear diary, Time for the meta-post of the year! During 2021, the blog racked up 28 posts (counting this one), about the same pace as 2020. That’s okay. As usual, let’s pick one post a month to represent the blogging year of 2021: January: A model of polygenic adaptation in an infinite population. We look at some equations and make two animations following Jain & Stephan (2017). February: The Fulsom Principle: Smart people will gladly ridicule others for breaking supposed rules that are in fact poorly justified. March: Theory in genetics. As I’m using more modelling in my work, here is some inspiration from an essay by Brian Charlesworth. As I hadn’t read Guest & Martin (2021) at the time, the post only cites Robinaugh at al. (2020) and music theory youtuber Adam Neely, and that’s also quite good. April: Researchers in ecology and evolution don’t use Platt’s strong inference, and that’s okay. This post is reacting to a paper that advocates explicit hypotheses in evolution and ecology, a paper I think qualifies as ”wrong, but wrong in an interesting and productive way” (can’t remember who said that). Also, this post also got one of the coveted Friday Links mentions on Dynamic Ecology, before it shut down. End of an era, death of blogs etc. May: Convincing myself about the Monty Hall problem Probably my favourite post of the year. It also shows the value of a physical model: I had what felt like the crucial moment that made the problem click as I was physically acting out Monty Hall choices with myself. Also, first shout-out to Guest & Martin (2021), a paper that will be cited again on the blog, I’m sure. I think the Monty Hall problem is a great example of their claim that a precise mathematical theory can’t defeat intuition unless you run the numbers and do the calculations. June: no posts, distracted by work and pandemic, I guess. July: Journal club of one: ”A unifying concept of animal breeding programmes”. Rather long post about a paper about a graphical method for displaying simulated breeding structures, and whether this qualifies as a formal specification or not. August: ”Dangerous gene myths abound” , reacting to an article by Philip Ball. The breathless hype around genomics is often embarrassing, but criticisms of reductionism in genetics love attacking caricatures. September: Belief in science, some meditations on how little it knows and how science ”works whether you believe in it or not” October–November: extended blog vacation December: Well, there are only two to choose from, but the other day I posted some notes about two methods that try to infer recent population history from linkage disequilibrium. Outwith the blog, there were also some papers published. I’m really behind on giving them their own blog posts, but that might be rectified in time. The blog runs on its own schedule where papers remain ”recent” for several years. What else is new? Astute readers may have noticed that my job description has changed from ”postdoc” to ”researcher”. Now, ”researcher” is a little bit of an ambiguous title because some institutions also use it for time limited positions — but no, dear reader, I am now permanently employed at the Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences where, among other things, I lead the ”Genome dynamics of livestock breeding” project financed by the research council Formas. This will be great fun, and also show on the blog in time, I’m sure. # Estimating recent population history from linkage disequilibrium with GONE and SNeP In this post, we will look at running two programs that infer population history — understood as changes in linkage disequilibrium over time — from genotype data. The post will chronicle running them on some simulated data; it will be light on theory, and light on methods evaluation. Linkage disequilibrium, i.e. correlation between alleles at different genetic variants, breaks down over time when alleles are shuffled by recombination. The efficiency of that process depends on the distance between the variants (because variants close to each other on the same chromosome will recombine less often) and the population size (because more individuals means more recombinations). Those relationships mean that the strength of linkage disequilibrium at a particular distance between variants is related to the population size at a particular time. (Roughly, and assuming a lot.) There are several methods that make use of the relationship between effective population size, recombination rate and linkage disequilibrium to estimate population history. # The programs The two programs we’ll look at are SNeP and GONE. They both first calculate different statistics of pairwise linkage disequilibrium between markers. SNeP groups pairs of markers into groups based on the distance between them, and estimates the effective population size for each group and how many generations ago each group represents. GONE goes further: it uses a formula for the expected linkage disequilibrium from a sequence of effective population sizes and a genetic algorithm to find such a sequence that fits the observed linkage disequilibrium at different distances. Paper about GONE: Santiago, E., Novo, I., Pardiñas, A. F., Saura, M., Wang, J., & Caballero, A. (2020). Recent demographic history inferred by high-resolution analysis of linkage disequilibrium. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 37(12), 3642-3653. Paper about SNeP: Barbato, M., Orozco-terWengel, P., Tapio, M., & Bruford, M. W. (2015). SNeP: a tool to estimate trends in recent effective population size trajectories using genome-wide SNP data. Frontiers in genetics, 6, 109. These methods are suited for estimating recent population history in single closed populations. There are other methods, e.g. the Pairwise Markovian coealescent and methods based on Approximate Bayesian Computation, that try to reach further back in time or deal with connected populations. (Humorously, barring one capitalisation difference, GONE shares it’s name with an unrelated program related to effective population sizes, GONe … There are not enough linkage disequilibrium puns to go around, I guess.) # Some fake data First, let us generate some fake data to run the programs on. We will use the Markovian coalescent simulator MaCS inside AlphaSimR. That is, we won’t really make use of any feature of AlphaSimR except that it’s a convenient way to run MaCS. There is a GitHub repo if you want to follow along. We simulate a constant population, a population that decreased in size relatively recently, a population that increased in size recently, and a population that decreased in longer ago. The latter should be outside of what these methods can comfortably estimate. Finally, let’s also include a population that has migration from an other (unseen) population. Again, that should be a case these methods struggle with. Simulated true population histories. Note that the horizontal axis is generations ago, meaning that if you read left to right, it runs backwards in time. This is typical when showing population histories like this, but can be confusing. Also not the different scales on the horizontal axis. library(AlphaSimR) library(purrr) library(tibble) ## Population histories recent_decrease <- tibble(generations = c(1, 50, 100, 150), Ne = c(1000, 1500, 2000, 3000)) recent_increase <- tibble(generations = c(1, 50, 100, 150), Ne = c(3000, 2000, 1500, 1000)) ancient_decrease <- tibble(generations = recent_decrease$generations + 500,
Ne = recent_decrease$Ne)  We can feed these population histories (almost) directly into AlphaSimR’s runMacs2 function. The migration case is a little bit more work because we will to modify the command, but AlphaSimR still helps us. MaCS takes a command line written using the same arguments as the paradigmatic ms program. The runMacs2 function we used above generates the MaCS command line for us; we can ask it to just return the command for us to modify. The split argument tells us that we want two populations that split 100 generations ago. runMacs2(nInd = 100, Ne = recent_decrease$Ne[1],
histGen = recent_decrease$generations[-1], histNe = recent_decrease$Ne[-1],
split = 100,
returnCommand = TRUE)


The resulting command looks like this:

"1e+08 -t 1e-04 -r 4e-05 -I 2 100 100  -eN 0.0125 1.5 -eN 0.025 2 -eN 0.0375 3 -ej 0.025001 2 1"

The first part is the number of basepairs on the chromosome, -t flag is for the population mutation rate $\theta = 4 N_e \mu$, -r for the recombination rate (also multiplied by four times the effective population size). The -eN arguments change the population size, and the -ej argument is for splitting and joining populations.

We can check that these numbers make sense: The population mutation rate of 10-4 is the typical per nucleotide mutation rate of 2.5 × 10-8 multiplied by four times the final population size of 1000. The scaled recombination rate of 4 × 10-5 is typical per nucleotide recombination rate of 10-8 multiplied by the same.

The population size changes (-eN arguments) are of the format scaled time followed by a scaling of the final population size. Times are scaled by four times the final population size, again. This means that 0.0125 followed by 1.5 refers to that 4 × 0.0125 × 1000 = 50 generations ago population size was 1.5 times the final population size, namely 1500. And so on.

-I (I assume for ”island” as in the ”island model”) sets up the two populations, each with 100 individuals and a migration rate between them. We modify this by setting it to 200 for the first population (because we want diploid individuals, so we need double the number of chromosomes) and 0 for the other; that is, this ghost population will not be observed, only used to influence the first one by migration. Then we set the third parameter, that AlphaSimR has not used: the migration rate. Again, this is expressed as four times the final population size, so for a migration rate of 0.05 we put 200.

Now we can run all cases to generate samples of 100 individuals.

migration_command <- "1e+08 -t 1e-04 -r 4e-05 -I 2 200 0 200  -eN 0.0125 1.5 -eN 0.025 2 -eN 0.0375 3 -ej 0.025001 2 1"

pops <- list(pop_constant = runMacs2(nInd = 100,
nChr = 5,
histNe = NULL,
histGen = NULL,
Ne = 1000),

pop_recent = runMacs2(nInd = 100,
nChr = 5,
Ne = recent_decrease$Ne[1], histGen = recent_decrease$generations[-1],
histNe = recent_decrease$Ne[-1]), pop_increase = runMacs2(nInd = 100, nChr = 5, Ne = recent_increase$Ne[1],
histGen = recent_increase$generations[-1], histNe = recent_increase$Ne[-1]),

pop_ancient = runMacs2(nInd = 100,
nChr = 5,
Ne = ancient_decrease$Ne[1], histGen = ancient_decrease$generations[-1],

./script_GONE.sh ${CASE} done  GONE puts its output files (named with the prefixes Output_Ne_, Output_d2_ and OUTPUT_ followed by the base name of the input files) in the same directory. The most interesting is Output_Ne_ which contains the estimates and the all caps OUTPUT_ file that contains logging information about the run. Estimates look like this: Ne averages over 40 independent estimates. Generation Geometric_mean 1 1616.29 2 1616.29 3 1616.29 4 1616.29 5 1291.22 6 1221.75 7 1194.16 8 1157.95 ...  And the log looks like this: TOTAL NUMBER OF SNPs 10000 HARDY-WEINBERG DEVIATION -0.009012 Hardy-Weinberg deviation (sample) -0.003987 Hardy-Weinberg deviation (population) CHROMOSOME 1 NIND(real sample)=100 NSNP=2000 NSNP_calculations=2000 NSNP_+2alleles=0 NSNP_zeroes=0 NSNP_monomorphic=0 NIND_corrected=100.000000 freq_MAF=0.005000 F_dev_HW (sample)=-0.009017 F_dev_HW (pop)=-0.003992 Genetic distances available in map file ...  I will now discuss a couple of issues I ran into. Note, this should not be construed as any kind of criticism of the programs or their authors. Everyone is responsible for their own inability to properly read manuals; I just leave them here in case they are helpful to someone else. • If you forget to set the permissions of the binaries, the error message will look like this:/ DIVIDE .ped AND .map FILES IN CHROMOSOMES ./script_GONE.sh: line 96: ./PROGRAMMES/MANAGE_CHROMOSOMES2: Permission denied RUNNING ANALYSIS OF CHROMOSOMES ... cp: cannot stat 'chromosome*': No such file or directory bash: ./PROGRAMMES/LD_SNP_REAL3: Permission denied ...  • Whereas Plink allows various different kinds of allele symbols in .ped files, GONE does not like allele codes that don’t look like A, C, G or T. The error message for other symbols looks like this: DIVIDE .ped AND .map FILES IN CHROMOSOMES RUNNING ANALYSIS OF CHROMOSOMES ... CHROMOSOME ANALYSES took 0 seconds Running GONE Format error in file outfileLD Format error in file outfileLD Format error in file outfileLD Format error in file outfileLD Format error in file outfileLD ...  # Running SNeP SNeP is only available as binaries on its Sourceforge page. Again, I’m using Linux binaries, so I downloaded the Linux binary from there and put it into a tools folder. The binary can be run from any directory, controlling the settings with command line flags. This would run SNeP on one of our simulated datasets, using the Haldane mapping function and correction of linkage disequilibrium values for sample size; these seem to be reasonable defaults: ./SNeP1.1 -ped simulation/pop_constant.ped -out snep/pop_constant -samplesize 2 -haldane Thus, we write a run script like this: #!/bin/bash ## As opposed to GONE, SNeP comes as one binary that can run from any directory. We still create ## a working directory to keep the output files in. mkdir snep ## We loop over all cases, reading the data from the "simulation" directory, ## and directing the output to the "snep" directory. The settings are to ## correct r-squared for sample size using the factor 2, and to use the Haldane ## mapping function. We direct the output to a text file for logging purposes. for CASE in pop_constant pop_recent pop_ancient pop_migration pop_increase; do ./tools/snep/SNeP1.1 \ -ped simulation/${CASE}.ped \
-out snep/${CASE} \ -samplesize 2 \ -haldane > snep/${CASE}_out.txt

done


SNeP creates two ouptut files with the given prefix, one with the extension .NeAll with the estimates a log file with the suffix SNeP.log file. Above, we also save the standard output to another log file.

Estimates look like this:

GenAgo	Ne	dist	r2	r2SD	items
13	593	3750544	0.0165248	0.0241242	37756
15	628	3272690	0.017411	0.0256172	34416
18	661	2843495	0.0184924	0.0281098	30785
20	681	2460406	0.0200596	0.0310288	27618
24	721	2117017	0.0214468	0.0313662	24898
...

Issues I ran into:

• There are two versions of SNeP on Sourceforge, version 1.1 and version 11.1. According to the readme, SNeP requires ”GCC 4.8.2 or newer”, which I guess is a way to say that it needs a recent enough version of GLIBC, the runtime library that includes the C++ standard library. SNeP 1.11 appears to depend on GLIBC 2.29, and because I have 2.27, I had to use SNeP version 1.1 instead. It might be possible that it doesn’t require the new version of glibc, and that one could build from source on my system — but the source is not available, so who knows; this is a problem with distributing software as binaries only.
• You cannot specify just a file name for your output. It needs to be a directory followed by a file name; that is, ”snep_constant” is not okay, but ”./snep_constant” is. The error looks like this:
/tools/snep/SNeP1.1 -ped constant.ped -out snep_constant
*************************************
*                SNeP               *
*                v1.1               *
*       barbatom@cardiff.ac.uk      *
*************************************

Sat Dec 25 13:09:38 2021

The -out path provided gives an error, aborting.


# The moment you’ve been waiting for

Let’s read the results and look at the estimates!

Estimates from GONE, with default settings, and SNeP, with reasonable setting used in the SNeP paper, applied to simulated data from different scenarios. Grey dots are estimates, and black lines the true simulated population history. The estimates go on for a while, but as per the GONE paper’s recommendations, we should not pay attention to estimates further back in time where these methods are not accurate. That is, we should probably concentrate on the first 100 generations or so.

Again, this isn’t a systematic methods evaluation, so this shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of the programs or methods. But we can note that in these circumstances, the estimates capture some features of the simulated population histories but gets other features quite wrong. GONE estimates a recent decrease in the scenario with a recent decrease, but not the further decreases before, and a recent increase when there was a recent increase, but overestimates its size by a few thousand. In the migration scenario, GONE shows the kind of artefact the authors tell us to expect, namely a drastic population size drop. Unexpectedly, though, it estimates a similar drastic drop in the scenario with constant population size. SNeP captures the recent decrease, but underestimates its size. In fact, SNeP estimates a similar shape in all scenarios, both for increased, decreased and constant populations.

The plotting code looks something like this (see GitHub for the details): we create the file names, read all the output files into the same data frame with map_dfr, label them by what case they belong to by joining with the data frame of labels (with inner_join from dplyr) and make a plot with ggplot2. The true_descriptions data frame contains the true population histories used to simulate the data.

library(ggplot2)

cases <- tibble(case = c("pop_constant",
"pop_recent",
"pop_ancient",
"pop_migration",
"pop_increase"),
description = c("Constant",
"Recent decrease",
"Ancient decrease",
"Recent decrease with migration",
"Recent increase"))

snep_file_names <- paste("snep/", cases$case, ".NeAll", sep = "") names(snep_file_names) <- cases$case

snep <- map_dfr(snep_file_names, read_tsv, .id = "case")

snep_descriptions <- inner_join(snep, cases)
snep_descriptions$description <- factor(snep_descriptions$description,
levels = casesdescription) ## Make both a plot of the entire range of estimates, and a plot of the ## first 200 generations, which is the region where estimates are expected ## to be of higher quality plot_snep_unconstrained <- ggplot() + geom_point(aes(x = GenAgo, y = Ne), data = snep_descriptions, colour = "grey") + facet_wrap(~ description, scale = "free_y", ncol = 2) + geom_segment(aes(x = start, y = Ne, xend = end, yend = Ne), data = true_descriptions) + theme_bw() + theme(panel.grid = element_blank(), strip.background = element_blank()) + xlab("Generations ago") plot_snep <- plot_snep_unconstrained + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(0, 200), ylim = c(0, 3000))  # När kartan inte stämmer med terrängen gäller terrängen When the results of a method don’t agree with the parameters of simulated data, the problem can either lie with the method or with the simulated data. And in this case, coalescent simulation is known to have problems with linkage disequilibrium. Here is a figure (Fig A, of appendix 2) of Nelson et al. (2020) who study the problems with coalescent simulations over long regions (such as the ones we simulated here). The problem occurs for variants that are far apart (e.g. at around 100 = 1 expected recombinations between loci), where there should still be linkage disequilibrium, whereas the coalescent simulator (in this figure, ”msprime (Hudson)”) gives too low linkage disequilibrium. When we try to estimate effective population size late in population history, the methods rely on linkage equilibrium between markers far apart, and if they have too low linkage disequilibrium, the estimated population size should be too large. This does not appear to be what is going on here, but there might be more subtle problems with the simulated linkage disequilibrium that fools these methods; we could try something like Nelson et al.’s hybrid method or a forward simulation instead. Literature Barbato, M., Orozco-terWengel, P., Tapio, M., & Bruford, M. W. (2015). SNeP: a tool to estimate trends in recent effective population size trajectories using genome-wide SNP data. Frontiers in genetics, 6, 109. Nelson, D., Kelleher, J., Ragsdale, A. P., Moreau, C., McVean, G., & Gravel, S. (2020). Accounting for long-range correlations in genome-wide simulations of large cohorts. PLoS genetics, 16(5), e1008619. Santiago, E., Novo, I., Pardiñas, A. F., Saura, M., Wang, J., & Caballero, A. (2020). Recent demographic history inferred by high-resolution analysis of linkage disequilibrium. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 37(12), 3642-3653. # Advent of Code observations Let’s talk about something fun: the Advent of Code, where each day from the 1st to the 25th of December a new programming puzzle is presented for you to solve. A friend roped me into trying it this year, and I decided to try it in Python for learning purposes. Now halfway in, the difficulty level of the puzzles has increased, and I’m probably not doing all of them. Time to write down some reflections! First, as one might expect, I have learned more Python this December than in several years of thinking ”I ought to learn a little Python at some point”. I’ve also started liking Python much more. Most of my professional Python experiences have been about running other peoples’ research code — sometimes with relative ease, and sometimes with copious dependence management. Dependence problems don’t make any language seem appealing. Advent of Code, on the other hand, is exactly what makes programming fun: small self-contained problems with well-defined solutions, test cases already prepared, and absolutely no need to install a years-old version of scikit-learn. And there is a lot to like about Python: list comprehensions (they are just fabulous!), automatic unpacking of tuples (yum!), numpy and pandas. # ”The events leading up to the Second World War do not include the Second World War” Second, it’s fun to notice what my most common errors are. I am a committed and enthusiastic R user, and you can tell from my errors: for the first few puzzles, I tended to accidentally write functions that returned None, because I unthinkingly relied on the R convention that the last expression in a function is automatically returned. The second most common error, frustratingly, is IndentationError: unexpected indent from having empty lines in my functions that are not indented. See, I like having whitespace between ”paragraphs” of code. While I’ve gotten over my gripes with some other common Python features, it still puzzles me that anyone would think that’s it’s a good idea to demand empty lines to be correctly indented. Even more puzzling, popular programmer’s text editor Atom, in its default configuration, deletes ”unncessary” whitespaces upon saving a Python source file. After those, as expected, I’ve been making off-by-one errors like I was querying the UCSC Genome Browser for the first time (see this beautiful Biostars post for an explanation of that somewhat niche joke). I knew that Python counts from 0 where R counts from 1, but the difficulties don’t stop there. You also need to think about slices and ranges. This gives you the first two elements of a list in Python: pylist = ["a", "b", "c", "d"] pylist[0:2]  This gives you the first two elements of a list in R: rlist <- list("a", "b", "c", "d") rlist[1:2]  That is, 1:2 in R includes the last element, 2, whereas 0:2 in Python doesn’t. This is well known, well documented, mentioned in every tutorial — I still get it wrong. When we add ranges that go backwards, like in this function from Day 5, and you can see where this poor R user needs to scratch his head (and write more tests): def get_range(start, end): if (start > end): return range(start, end - 1, -1) else: return range(start, end + 1)  When I wrote about my common errors on Twitter, fellow quantitative geneticist Lorena Batista warned me about Python’s assignment, which works very differently from R’s. She was right. This has bitten me already. The way assignment works in Python, always passing around references to objects unless explicitly told to copy them, does not fit my intuitions about assignment at all. I feel uneasy about it and how it interacts with mutability — here we try to write proper functions that don’t have strange side effects, and then we clobber the parameters of the function instead. This will take some getting used to if I’m going to use Python more seriously. I don’t want to start any language quarrels, but even I see how Python feels cleaner than R in certain ways. Maybe getting ranges to go backwards doesn’t feel as natural, but at least you can expect the standard library to consistent case when naming things, whereas in R you will see model.matrix, pivot_longer, and stringsAsFactors in the same script (but the latter not for long, bye default factor conversion, you will not be missed). On the other hand, Python suffers from confusion about where the relevant functions can be found: some live as static methods in an object named like the module, some live in the objects themselves, and some are free-floating. In R, almost everything is free-floating, and if some package has objects with methods (like the SimParam class in AlphaSimR) you will remember because it’s the exception. # Parsing is half the problem A nice insight from the Advent of Code is that parsing is more important than I thought. I don’t mean that parsing custom text file formats is annoying and time consuming, even if it is. What I mean is that the second part of parsing, after you’ve solved the immediate problem of getting data out of a file, is data modelling. Take for example Day 12, a graph-related problem. If you have have the computational wherewithal to parse the map into an adjacency list, you are already well on your way to solving the problem. Or, take my favourite problem so far, Day 8: Seven Segment Search. This involved unscrambling some numbers from an imagined faulty display. The data looks like this example, and it’s not super important what it means, except that the words are scrambled digits, and that each row represents one set of observations: be cfbegad cbdgef fgaecd cgeb fdcge agebfd fecdb fabcd edb | fdgacbe cefdb cefbgd gcbe edbfga begcd cbg gc gcadebf fbgde acbgfd abcde gfcbed gfec | fcgedb cgb dgebacf gc fgaebd cg bdaec gdafb agbcfd gdcbef bgcad gfac gcb cdgabef | cg cg fdcagb cbg It’s always ten words, followed by the delimiter, followed by another four words. This looks a little like a data frame, and I’m accustomed to thinking about tabular data structures. Therefore, unthinking, I used pandas to read this into a data frame, which I then sliced into two. import pandas import numpy as np data = pandas.read_table("day8.txt", sep = " ", header = None) digits = data.iloc[:, :10] output = data.iloc[:, 11:15]  That was good enough to easily solve the first part, which was about counting particular digits (i.e., words with particular numbers of characters in them): def count_simple_digits(digits): """ Count 1, 4, 7, 8 in a column of digits """ simple = [digit for digit in digits if len(digit) in [2, 4, 3, 7]] return len(simple) sum([count_simple_digits(output[column]) for column in output])  Then comes part two, which was trickier, but more rewarding. I was pretty proud about my matrix-based solution, but that’s not the point here; I’m skipping over the functions that contain the solution. The point is that when I came to applying them to the real data, I had to do it in a clunky and I dare say unpythonic way: ## Apply to actual data sorted_digits = digits.apply(sort_digits, axis = 0) sorted_outputs = output.apply(sort_digits, axis = 0) decoded = [] for ix in range(digits.shape[0]): segment_sum = np.sum(get_segments_shared(sorted_digits.iloc[ix]), axis = 1).tolist() matched_digits = match_digits(segment_sum, segment_sums_normal) decoded.append(decode_output(sorted_outputs.iloc[ix].tolist(), sorted_digits.iloc[ix].tolist(), matched_digits))  Look at that indexing over rows, which is not a smooth operation on a data frame. My problem here is that I stored the data on the same set of digits over ten columns (and four more columns for the words after the delimiter), when it would have been much more natural to have each data point pertaining to the same set of digits stored together in one structure — anything that you can easily iterate over without an indexed for loop. The lesson, which applies to R code as well, is to not always reach for the tabular data structure just because it’s familiar and comes with a nice read_csv function, but to give more thought to data modelling. # Belief in science It can be a touchy topic whether people who do science or make use of outcomes of science are supposed to believe in science. I can think of at least three ways that we may or may not believe in science. # Knowledge tunnels Imagine that we try to apply the current state of scientific knowledge to some everyday occurrence. It could be something that happens when cooking, a very particular sensation you notice in your body, anything that you have practical experience-based knowledge about, one of those particular phenomena that anyone notices when in some practical line of work. Every trade has its own specialised terminology and models of explanation that develops based on experience. When looking closely, we will often find that the current state of scientific knowledge does not have a theory, model or explanation ready for us. This might not be because the problem is so hard to be unsolvable. It might be because the problem has simply been overlooked. That means that if we want to maintain a world view where science has the answer, we don’t just need to believe in particular statements that science makes. We also need to trust that a scientific explanation can be developed for many cases where one doesn’t exist yet. I can’t remember who I read who used this image (I think it might have been a mathematician): knowledge is not a solid body of work, but more like tunnels dug out of the mostly unknown. We don’t know most things, but we know some paths dug through this mass. # Whether you believe in it or not There is another popular saying: the good thing about it is that it works whether you believe in it or not — said by Neil DeGrasse Tyson about science and attributed to Niels Bohr about superstition. This seems to be true, not just about deep cases such as keeping one set of methodological assumptions for your scientific work and another, say a deeply spiritual religious one, for your personal life. It seems to be true about the way we expect scientists to work and communicate on an everyday level. Scientists do not need to be committed to every statement in their writing or every hypothesis they pursue. Dang & Bright (2021) ask what demands we should put on individual scientific contributions (e.g. journal articles). They consider assertion norms, the idea that certain types of utterances are appropriate for a certain context, and argue that scientific contributions should not be held to these norms. That is, scientific claims need not be something the researcher knows, has justification for, or believes. They give an example of a scientist who comes up with a new hypothesis, and performs some research that supports it. Overall, however, the literature does not support it. The scientist publishes a paper advocating for the hypothesis. In a few years, further research demonstrates that it is false. They suggest that in this case, the scientist has done what we expect scientists to do, even if: • The claims are not accurate; they are false. • The claims are not justified, in the sense that they do not have the support of the wider literature, and the data do not conclusively support the hypothesis. • The scientist did not fully believe the claims. They try to explain these norms of communication with reference to how the scientific community learns. They argue that this way of communicating facilitates an intellectual division of labour: different researchers consider different ideas and theories, that might at times be at odds, and therefore there is value to allowing them to them saying conflicting things. The rejected norms were picked as the basis of our inquiry since they had been found plausible or defensible as norms for assertion, which is at least a somewhat related activity of putting forward scientific public avowals. So why this discrepancy? In short, we think this is because the social enterprise of inquiry requires that we allow people to be more lax in certain contexts than we normally require of individuals offering testimony, and through a long process of cultural evolution the scientific community developed norms of avowal to accommodate that fact. Another reason, pragmatically, why scientists might not be fully committed to everything they’ve written is that, at least in natural science, writing often happens by committee. And not just a committee of co-authors, but also by reviewers and editors, who also take part in negotiations about what can be claimed in any piece of peer reviewed writing. Yes, there are people who like to say that every co-author needs to be able to take full responsibility for everything written — but the real lowest common denominator seems that none of the co-authors objects too much to what is written. # Weak citations Finally, there appears to be two ways to think about claims when reading or writing scientific papers, that may explain that researchers can be at the same time highly critical of some claims, and somewhat credulous about other claims. Think of your typical introduction to an empirical paper, which will often have citations in passing to stylised facts that are taken to be true, but not explored at any depth — those ”neutral citations” that some think are shallow and damaging. Does that mean that scientists are lazy about the truth, just believing the first thing they see and jumping on citation bandwagons? Maybe. Because there is no other way they could write, really. When we read or write about science, we have to divide claims into those that are currently under critical scrutiny, and those that are currently considered background. If we believe Quine, there isn’t an easy way to separate these two types of ideas, no logical division into hypothesis proper and auxiliary assumption. But we still need to make it, possibly in an arbitrary way, unless we want our research project to be an endless rabbit hole of questions. This does not mean that we have to believe the background claims in any deeper sense. They might be up for scrutiny tomorrow. This is another reason why it’s a bad idea to try to learn a field by reading the introductions to empirical papers. Introductions are not critical expositions that synthesise evidence and give the best possible view of the state of the field. They just try to get the important background out of the way so we can move on with the work at hand. Literature Dang, H., & Bright, L. K. (2021). Scientific conclusions need not be accurate, justified, or believed by their authors. Synthese. # ”Dangerous gene myths abound” Philip Ball, who is a knowledgeable and thoughtful science writer, published an piece in the Guardian a couple of months ago about the misunderstood legacy of the human genome project: ”20 years after the human genome was first sequenced, dangerous gene myths abound”. The human genome project published the draft reference genome for the human species 20 years ago. Ball argues, in short, that the project was oversold with promises that it couldn’t deliver, and consequently has not delivered. Instead, the genome project was good for other things that had more to do with technology development and scientific infrastructure. The sequencing of the human genome was the platform for modern genome science, but it didn’t, for example, cure cancer or uncover a complete set of instructions for building a human. He also argues that the rhetoric of human genome hype, which did not end with the promotion of the human genome project (see the ENCODE robot punching cancer in the face, for example), is harmful. It is scientifically harmful because it oversimplifies modern genetics, and it is politically harmful because it aligns well with genetic determinism and scientific racism. I believe Ball is entirely right about this. # Selling out The breathless hype around the human genome project was embarrassing. Ball quotes some fragments, but you can to to the current human genome project site and enjoy quotes like ”it’s a transformative textbook of medicine, with insights that will give health care providers immense new powers to treat, prevent and cure disease”. This image has some metonymical truth to it — human genomics is helping medical science in different ways — but even as a metaphor, it is obviously false. You can go look at the human reference genome if you want, and you will discover that the ”text” such as it is looks more like this than a medical textbook: TTTTTTTTCCTTTTTTTTCTTTTGAGATGGAGTCTCGCTCTGCCGCCCAGGCTGGAGTGC AGTAGCTCGATCTCTGCTCACTGCAAGCTCCGCCTCCCGGGTTCACGCCATTCTCCTGCC TCAGCCTCCTGAGTAGCTGGGACTACAGGCGCCCACCACCATGCCCAGCTAATTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTGGTATTTTTAGTAGAGACGGGGTTTCACCGTGTTAGCCAGGATGGTCTC AATCTCCTGACCTTGTGATCCGCCCGCCTCGGCCTCCCACAGTGCTGGGATTACAGGC This is a human Alu element from chromosome 17. It’s also in an intron of a gene, flanking a promoter, a few hundred basepairs away from an insulator (see the Ensembl genome browser) … All that is stuff that cannot be read from the sequence alone. You might be able to tell that it’s Alu if you’re an Alu genius or run a sequence recognition software, but there is no to read the other contextual genomic information, and there is no way you can tell anything about human health by reading it. I think Ball is right that this is part of simplistic genetics that doesn’t appreciate the complexity either quantitative or molecular genetics. In short, quantitative genetics, as a framework, says that inheritance of traits between relatives is due to thousands and thousands of genetic differences each of them with tiny effects. Molecular genetics says that each of those genetic differences may operate through any of a dizzying selection of Rube Goldberg-esque molecular mechanisms, to the point where understanding one of them might be a lifetime of laboratory investigation. Simple inheritance is essentially a fiction, or put more politely: a simple model that is useful as a step to build up a more better picture of inheritance. This is not knew; the knowledge that everything of note is complex has been around since the beginning of genetics. Even rare genetic diseases understood as monogenic are caused by sometimes thousands of different variants that happen in a particular small subset of the genome. Really simple traits, in the sense of one variant–one phenotype, seldom happen in large mixing and migrating populations like humans; they may occur in crosses constructed in the lab, or in extreme structured populations like dog breeds or possibly with balancing selection. # Can you market thick sequencing? Ball is also right about what it was most useful about the human genome project: it enabled research at scale into human genetic variation, and it stimulated development of sequencing methods, both generating and using DNA sequence. Lowe (2018) talks about ”thick” sequencing, a notion of sequencing that includes associated activities like assembly, annotation and distribution to a community of researchers — on top of ”thin” sequencing as determination of sequences of base pairs. Thick sequencing better captures how genome sequencing is used and stimulates other research, and aligns with how sequencing is an iterative process, where reference genomes are successively refined and updated in the face of new data, expert knowledge and quality checking. It is hard to imagine gene editing like CRISPR being applied in any human cell without a good genome sequence to help find out what to cut out and what to put instead. It is hard to imagine the developments in functional genomics that all use short read sequencing as a read-out without having a good genome sequence to anchor the reads on. It is possible to imagine genome-wide association just based on very dense linkage maps, but it is a bit far-fetched. And so on. Now, this raises a painful but interesting question: Would the genome project ever have gotten funded on reasonable promises and reasonable uncertainties? If not, how do we feel about the genome hype — necessary evil, unforgivable deception, something in-between? Ball seems to think that gene hype was an honest mistake and that scientists were surprised that genomes turned out to be more complicated than anticipated. Unlike him, I do not believe that most researchers honestly believed the hype — they must have known that they were overselling like crazy. They were no fools. An example of this is the story about how many genes humans have. Ball writes: All the same, scientists thought genes and traits could be readily matched, like those children’s puzzles in which you trace convoluted links between two sets of items. That misconception explains why most geneticists overestimated the total number of human genes by a factor of several-fold – an error typically presented now with a grinning “Oops!” rather than as a sign of a fundamental error about what genes are and how they work. This is a complicated history. Gene number estimates are varied, but enjoy this passage from Lewontin in 1977: The number of genes is not large While higher organisms have enough DNA to specify from 100,000 to 1,000,000 proteins of average size, it appears that the actual number of cistrons does not exceed a few thousand. Thus, saturation lethal mapping of the fourth chromosome (Hochman, 1971) and the X chromosome (Judd, Shen and Kaufman, 1972) of Drosophila melanogbaster make it appear that there is one cistron per salivary chromosome band, of which there are 5,000 in this species. Whether 5,000 is a large or small number of total genes depends, of course, on the degree of interaction of various cistrons in influencing various traits. Nevertheless, it is apparent that either a given trait is strongly influenced by only a small number of genes, or else there is a high order of gene interactions among developmental systems. With 5,000 genes we cannot maintain a view that different parts of the organism are both independent genetically and each influenced by large number of gene loci. I don’t know if underestimating by an few folds is worse than overestimating by a few folds (D. melanogaster has 15,000 protein-coding genes or so), but the point is that knowledgeable geneticists did not go around believing that there was a simple 1-to-1 mapping between genes and traits, or even between genes and proteins at this time. I know Lewontin is a population geneticist, and in the popular mythology population geneticists are nothing but single-minded bean counters who do not appreciate the complexity of molecular biology … but you know, they were no fools. # The selfish cistron One thing Ball gets wrong is evolutionary genetics, where he mixes genetic concepts that, really, have very little to do with each other despite superficially sounding similar. Yet plenty remain happy to propagate the misleading idea that we are “gene machines” and our DNA is our “blueprint”. It is no wonder that public understanding of genetics is so blighted by notions of genetic determinism – not to mention the now ludicrous (but lucrative) idea that DNA genealogy tells you which percentage of you is “Scots”, “sub-Saharan African” or “Neanderthal”. This passage smushes two very different parts of genetics together, that don’t belong together and have nothing to do with with the preceding questions about how many genes there are or if the DNA is a blueprint: The gene-centric view of adaptation, a way of thinking of natural selection where you imagine genetic variants (not organisms, not genomes, not populations or species) as competing for reproduction; and genetic genealogy and ancestry models, where you describe how individuals are related based on the genetic variation they carry. The gene-centric view is about adaptation, while genetic genealogy works because of effectively neutral genetics that just floats around, giving us a unique individual barcode due to the sheer combinatorics. He doesn’t elaborate on the gene machines, but it links to a paper (Ridley 1984) on Williams’ and Dawkins’ ”selfish gene” or ”gene-centric perspective”. I’ve been on about this before, but when evolutionary geneticists say ”selfish gene”, they don’t mean ”the selfish protein-coding DNA element”; they mean something closer to ”the selfish allele”. They are not committed to any view that the genome is a blueprint, or that only protein-coding genes matter to adaptation, or that there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between genetic variants and traits. This is the problem with correcting misconceptions in genetics: it’s easy to chide others for being confused about the parts you know well, and then make a hash of some other parts that you don’t know very well yourself. Maybe when researchers say ”gene” in a context that doesn’t sound right to you, they have a different use of the word in mind … or they’re conceptually confused fools, who knows. Literature Lewontin, R. C. (1977). The relevance of molecular biology to plant and animal breeding. In International Conference on Quantitative Genetics. Ames, Iowa (USA). 16-21 Aug 1976. Lowe, J. W. (2018). Sequencing through thick and thin: Historiographical and philosophical implications. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 72, 10-27. # Using R: plyr to purrr, part 1 This is the second post about my journey towards writing more modern Tidyverse-style R code; here is the previous one. We will look at the common case of taking subset of data out of a data frame, making some complex R object from them, and then extracting summaries from those objects. # More nostalgia about plyr I miss the plyr package. Especially ddply, ldply, and dlply, my favourite trio of R functions of all times. Yes, the contemporary Tidyverse package dplyr is fast and neat. And those plyr functions operating on arrays were maybe overkill; I seldom used them. But plyr was so smooth, so beautiful, and — after you’ve bashed your head against it for some time and it changed your mind — so intuitive. The package still exists, but it’s retired, and we shouldn’t keep writing R code like it’s 2009, should we? I used to like to do something like this: take a data frame, push it through a function that returns some complex object, store those objects in a list, and then map various functions over that list to extract the parts I care about. What is the equivalent in the new idiom? To do the same thing but with the purrr package, of course! purrr replaces the list-centric parts of plyr, while dplyr covers data frame-centric summarisation, mutation and so on. For this example we will be using the lm function on subsets of data and store the model object. It’s the simple case that everyone reaches for to demonstrate these features, but it’s a bit dubious. If you find yourself fitting a lot of linear models to subsets, maybe there are other models you should think about Especially here, when the fake data just happens to come from a multilevel model with varying intercepts … But in this case, let’s simulate a simple linear regression and look at the coefficients we get out. set.seed(20210807) n_groups <- 10 group_sizes <- rpois(n_groups, 10) n <- sum(group_sizes) fake_data <- tibble(id = 1:n, group = rep(1:n_groups, times = group_sizes), predictor = runif(n, 0, 1)) group_intercept <- rnorm(n_groups, 0, 1) fake_dataresponse <- fake_data$predictor * 10 + group_intercept[fake_data$group] +
rnorm(n)


And here is the plyr code: First, dlply takes us from a data frame, splitting it by group, to a list of linear models. Then, ldply takes us from the list of models to a data frame of coefficients. tidy is a function from the wonderful broom package which extracts the same information as you would get in the rather unwieldy object from summary(lm), but as a data frame.

library(plyr)
library(broom)

fit_model <- function(data) {
lm(response ~ predictor, data)
}

models <- dlply(fake_data,
"group",
fit_model)
result <- ldply(models, tidy)


This is what the results might looks like. Notice how ldply adds the split labels nicely into the group column, so we know which rows came from which subset.

   group        term   estimate std.error  statistic      p.value
1      1 (Intercept) -0.2519167 0.5757214 -0.4375670 6.732729e-01
2      1   predictor 10.6136902 1.0051490 10.5593207 5.645878e-06
3      2 (Intercept)  3.1528489 0.6365294  4.9531864 7.878498e-04
4      2   predictor  8.2075766 1.1458702  7.1627452 5.292586e-05
5      3 (Intercept) -0.8103777 0.6901212 -1.1742542 2.786901e-01
...


# split/map: The modern synthesis

If we pull out purrr, we can get the exact same table like so. The one difference is that we get a tibble (that is, a contemporary, more well-behaved data frame) out of it instead of a base R data.frame.

library(purrr)

models <- map(split(fake_data,
fake_data$group), fit_model) result <- map_df(models, tidy, .id = "group")  # A tibble: 80 x 6 group term estimate std.error statistic p.value 1 1 (Intercept) 1.67 0.773 2.16 6.32e- 2 2 1 predictor 8.67 1.36 6.39 2.12e- 4 3 2 (Intercept) 4.11 0.566 7.26 4.75e- 5 4 2 predictor 8.19 1.11 7.36 4.30e- 5 5 3 (Intercept) -7.50 0.952 -7.89 9.99e- 5 6 3 predictor 11.5 1.75 6.60 3.03e- 4 7 4 (Intercept) -19.8 0.540 -36.7 7.32e-13 8 4 predictor 11.5 0.896 12.8 5.90e- 8 9 5 (Intercept) -12.4 1.03 -12.0 7.51e- 7 10 5 predictor 9.69 1.82 5.34 4.71e- 4 # … with 70 more rows  First, the base function split lets us break the data into subsets based on the values of a variable, which in this case is our group variable. The output of this function is a list of data frames, one for each group. Second, we use map to apply a function to each element of that list. The function is the same modelling function that we used above, which shoves the data into lm. We now have our list of linear models. Third, we apply the tidy function to each element of that list of models. Because we want the result to be one single data frame consolidating the output from each element, we use map_df, which will combine the results for us. (If we’d just use map again, we would get a list of data frames.) The .id argument tells map to add the group column that indicates what element of the list of models each row comes from. We want this to be able to identify the coefficients. If we want to be fancy, we can express with the Tidyverse-related pipe and dot notation: library(magrittr) result <- fake_data %>% split(.$group) %>%
map(fit_model) %>%
map_df(tidy, .id = "group")


# Nesting data into list columns

This (minus the pipes) is where I am at in most of my R code nowadays: split with split, apply with map and combine with map_dfr. This works well and looks neater than the lapply/Reduce solution discussed in part 0.

We can push it a step further, though. Why take the linear model out of the data frame, away from its group labels any potential group-level covariates — isn’t that just inviting some kind of mix-up of the elements? With list columns, we could store the groups in a data frame, keeping the data subsets and any R objects we generate from them together. (See Wickham’s & Grolemund’s R for Data Science for a deeper case study of this idea.)

library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

fake_data_nested <- nest(group_by(fake_data, group),
data = c(id, predictor, response))

fake_data_models <- mutate(fake_data_nested,
model = map(data,
fit_model),
estimates = map(model,
tidy))

result <- unnest(fake_data_models, estimates)



First, we use the nest function to create a data frame where each row is a group, and the ”data” column contains the data for that subset.

Then, we add two list columns to that data frame: our list of models, and then our list of data frames with the coefficients.

Finally, we extract the estimates into a new data frame with unnest. The result is the same data frame of coefficients and statistics, also carrying along the data subsets, linear models and coefficents.

The same code with pipes:

fake_data %>%
group_by(group) %>%
nest(data = c(id, predictor, response)) %>%
mutate(model = map(data, fit_model),
estimates = map(model, tidy)) %>%
unnest(estimates) -> ## right way assignment just for kicks
result



I’m still a list column sceptic, but I have to concede that this is pretty elegant. It gets the job done, it keeps objects that belong together together so that there is no risk of messing up the order, and it is not that much more verbose. I especially like that we can run the models and extract the coefficients in the same mutate call.

# Coda: mixed model

Finally, I can’t resist comparing the separate linear models to a linear mixed model of all the data.

We use lme4 to fit a varying-intercept model, a model that puts the same coefficient on the slope between the response and predictor in each group, but allows the intercepts to vary between groups, assuming them to be drawn from the same normal distribution. We put the coefficients from the linear models fit in each group separately and the linear mixed model together in the same data frame to be able to plot them.

library(ggplot2)
library(lme4)

model <- lmer(response ~ (1|group) + predictor,
fake_data)

lm_coef <- pivot_wider(result,
names_from = term,
values_from = estimate,
id_cols = group)

lmm_coef <- cbind(group = levels(model@flist$group), coef(model)$group)

model_coef <- rbind(transform(lm_coef, model = "lm"),
transform(lmm_coef, model = "lmm"))

colnames(model_coef)[2] <- "intercept"

ggplot() +
geom_point(aes(x = predictor,
y = response,
colour = factor(group)),
data = fake_data) +
geom_abline(aes(slope = predictor,
intercept = intercept,
colour = factor(group),
linetype = model),
data = model_coef) +
theme_bw() +
theme(panel.grid = element_blank())



As advertised, the linear mixed model has the same slope in every group, and intercepts pulled closer to the mean. Now, we know that this is a good model for these fake data because we created them, and in the real world, that is obviously not the case … The point is: if we are going to fit a more complex model of the whole data, we want to be able to explore alternatives and plot them together with the data. Having elegant ways to transform data frames and summarise models at our disposal makes that process smoother.

# ”It depends on what you want to do with it”

Note to self: ”It depends on what you want to do with it” is the stereotypical answer to questions about method and data analysis. Ask what genetic analysis software you should use to do X, how you should filter the variants you’ve detected from sequencing, whether to mark duplicates on your aligned reads, what a genetic parameter estimate means … I just wrote a version of this answer in an email. Mea maxima culpa.

Admittedly, it is probably often the technically correct answer, but it’s also useless without qualification. It always depends. Everything is everything-dependent. Goddag yxskaft. Moreover, I suspect that it often means ”I don’t know” or ”it doesn’t matter” — but you can’t say that, can you? That would sound unprofessional.

Here is what to ask either the supposed expert who blurted out this non-answer, or yourself if you are about to: What are the alternatives? A couple will do to give an idea of what the field of solutions and answers is like. What does it depend on? An idea of why one want to choose one alternative over the other will do. What do we need to know? Sometimes we need preliminary data, a huge modelling effort … or just that I go read some papers before I say anything more.

# A plot of genes on chromosomes

Marta Cifuentes and Wayne Crismani asked on Twitter if there is a web tool similar to the Arabidopsis Chromosome Map Tool that makes figures of genes on chromosomes for humans. This will not really be an answer to the question — not a web tool, not conveniently packaged — but I thought that would be a nice plot to make in R with ggplot2. We will use the ggrepel package to help with labelling, and get information from the Ensembl REST API with httr and jsonlite.

# The plot and the final code to generate it

Below I will go through the functions that get us there, but here is the end product. The code is on GitHub as usual.

## Some Ensembl genes to test with

ensembl_genes <- c("ENSG00000125845", ## BMP2
"ENSG00000181690", ## PLAG1
"ENSG00000177508", ## IRX3
"ENSG00000140718") ## FTO

chr_sizes <- get_chromosome_sizes_from_ensembl(species = "homo_sapiens")

coords <- get_coordinates_from_ensembl(ensembl_genes)

plot_genes_test <- plot_genes(coords,
chr_sizes)


We will use Ensembl and access the genes via Ensembl Gene IDs. Here, I’ve looked up the Ensembl Gene IDs for four genes I like (in humans).

We need to know how long human chromosomes are in order to plot them, so we have a function for that; we also need to get coordinates for the genes, and we have a function for that. They are both below. These functions call up the Ensembl REST API to get the data from the Ensembl database.

Finally, there is a plotting function that takes the coordinates and the chromosome sizes as input and return a ggplot2 plot.

# Getting the data out of the Ensembl REST API

Now, starting from the top, we will need to define those functions to interact with the Ensembl REST API. This marvellous machine allows us to get data out of the Ensembl database over HTTP, writing our questions in the URL. It is nicely described with examples from multiple languages on the Ensembl REST API website.

An alternative to using the REST API would be to download gene locations from BioMart. This was my first thought. BioMart is more familiar to me than the REST API, and it also has the nice benefit that it is easy to download every gene and store it away for the future. However, there isn’t a nice way to get chromosome lengths from BioMart, so we would have to download them from somewhere else. This is isn’t hard, but I thought using the REST API for both tasks seemed nicer.

## Plot showing the location of a few genomes on chromosomes

library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggplot2)
library(ggrepel)
library(purrr)

## Get an endpoint from the Ensembl REST api and return parsed JSON

get_from_rest_api <- function(endpoint_string,
server = "https://rest.ensembl.org/") {
rest <- GET(paste(server, endpoint_string, sep = ""),
content_type("application/json"))

stop_for_status(rest)

fromJSON(toJSON(content(rest)))
}


This first function gets content by sending a request, checking whether it worked (and stopping with an error if it didn’t), and then unpacking the content into an R object.

## Get chromosomes sizes from the Ensembl REST API

get_chromosome_sizes_from_ensembl <- function(species) {

json <- get_from_rest_api(paste("info/assembly/", species, sep = ""))

data.frame(name = as.character(json$top_level_region$name),
length = as.numeric(json$top_level_region$length),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
}


This second function asks for the genome assembly information for a particular species with the GET info/assembly/:species endpoint, and extracts the chromosome lengths into a data frame. The first part of data gathering is done, now we just need the coordinates fort the genes of interest.

## Get coordinates from Ensembl ids

get_coordinates_from_ensembl <- function(ensembl_ids) {

map_dfr(ensembl_ids,
function(ei) {
json <- get_from_rest_api(paste("lookup/id/", ei, sep = ""))

data.frame(position = (json$start + json$end)/2,
chr = json$seq_region_name, display_name = json$display_name,
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
})
}


This function asks for the gene information for each gene ID we’ve given it with the GET lookup/id/:id endpoint, and extracts the rough position (mean of start and end coordinate), chromosome name, and the ”display name”, which in the human case will be a gene symbol. (For genes that don’t have a gene symbol, we would need to set up this column ourselves.)

At this point, we have the data we need in two data frames. That means it’s time to make the plot.

# Plotting code

We will build a plot with two layers: first the chromosomes (as a geom_linerange) and then the gene locations (as a geom_text_repel from the ggrepel package). The text layer will move the labels around so that they don’t overlap even when the genes are close to each other, and by setting the nudge_x argument we can move them to the side of the chromosomes.

Apart from that, we change the scale to set he order of chromosomes and reverse the scale of the y-axis so that chromosomes start at the top of the plot.

The function returns a ggplot2 plot object, so one can do some further customisation after the fact — but for some features one would have to re-write things inside the function.

plot_genes <- function(coordinates,
chromosome_sizes) {

## Restrict to chromosomes that are in data
chrs_in_data <-
chromosome_sizes[chromosome_sizes$name %in% coordinates$chr,]
chr_order <- order(as.numeric(chrs_in_data$name)) ggplot() + geom_linerange(aes(x = name, ymin = 1, ymax = length/1e6), size = 2, colour = "grey", data = chrs_in_data) + geom_text_repel(aes(x = chr, y = position/1e6, label = display_name), nudge_x = 0.33, data = coordinates) + scale_y_reverse() + ## Fix ordering of chromosomes on x-axis scale_x_discrete(limits = chrs_in_data$name[chr_order],
labels = chrs_in_data\$name[chr_order]) +
theme_bw() +
theme(panel.grid = element_blank()) +
xlab("Chromosome") +
ylab("Position (Mbp)")

}


# Possible extensions

One feature from the Arabidopsis inspiration that is missing here is the position of centromeres. We should be able to use the option ?bands=1 in the GET info/assembly/:species to get cytogenetic band information and separate p and q arms of chromosomes. This will not be universal though, i.e. not available for most species I care about.

Except to make cartoons of gene positions, I think this might be a nice way to make plots of genome regions with very course resolution, i.e. linkage mapping results, where one could add lines to show genomic confidence intervals, for example.