Estimating Recombination Rates From Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Using Summary Statistics

We describe a novel method for jointly estimating crossing-over and gene-conversion rates from population genetic data using summary statistics. The performance of our method was tested on simulated data sets and compared with the composite-likelihood method of R. R. Hudson. For several realistic parameter values, the new method performed similarly to the composite-likelihood approach for estimating crossing-over rates and better when estimating gene-conversion rates. We used our method to analyze a human data set recently genotyped by Perlegen Sciences.