The common-pathway model provides a powerful tool for theory-based decomposition of genetic
and environmental differences.
umxCP supports this with pairs of mono-zygotic (MZ) and di-zygotic (DZ) twins reared together
to model the genetic and environmental structure of multiple phenotypes
(measured behaviors).
Common-pathway path diagram:
As can be seen, each phenotype also by default has A, C, and E influences specific to that phenotype.
Like the umxACE
model, the CP model decomposes phenotypic variance
into Additive genetic, unique environmental (E) and, optionally, either
common or shared-environment (C) or
non-additive genetic effects (D).
Unlike the Cholesky, these factors do not act directly on the phenotype. Instead latent A,
C, and E influences impact on one or more latent factors which in turn account for variance in the phenotypes (see Figure below).
Data Input
Currently, the umxCP function accepts only raw data. This may change in future versions.
Ordinal Data
In an important capability, the model transparently handles ordinal (binary or multi-level
ordered factor data) inputs, and can handle mixtures of continuous, binary, and ordinal
data in any combination.
Additional features
The umxCP function supports varying the DZ genetic association (defaulting to .5)
to allow exploring assortative mating effects, as well as varying the DZ “C” factor
from 1 (the default for modeling family-level effects shared 100
to .25 to model dominance effects.