Perform permutation tests to assess the statistical significance of the
hotspots detected using the West-Wu Q
-method permutations. The
ww.perm
function implements the Q
-method's permutation
scheme (see the Method's section of Chaibub Neto et a. 2012, for
details). The n.perm
parameter specifies the number of
simulations. Here we set it to 100 in order to save time. In practice,
we recommend at least 1,000 permutations. The function's output is a
matrix with 100 rows representing the permutations, and 10 columns
representing the QTL mapping thresholds. Each entry ij
, represents the
maximum number of significant linkages across the entire genome detected
at permutation i
, using the LOD threshold j
. The
ww.summary
function computes the Q-method's hotspot size
permutation thresholds, that is, the 1-alpha
quantiles for each
one of the QTL mapping LOD thrsholds in lod.thrs
. For instance,
the entry at row 10 and column 1 of the Q.1.thr
matrix tells us
that the 99% percentile of the permutation distribution of genome wide
maximum hotspot size based on a QTL mapping threshold of 2.11 is
27.00. In other words, any hotspot greater than 27 is considered
statistically significant at a 0.01 significance level when QTL mapping
is done using a 2.11 LOD threshold.
In general, we are often interested in using the same error rates for
the QTL mapping and hotspot analysis. That is, if we adopt a QTL mapping
threshold that controls GWER at a 1% level (in our case, 3.11) we will
also want to consider alpha = 0.01
for the hotspot analysis,
leading to a hotspot threshold of 12.00. Therefore, we are usually more
interested in the diagonal of Q.1.thr
. We adopted a GWER of 5%,
and the corresponding Q
-method's permutation threshold is
18. According to this threshold, all hotspots are significant.