This repository contains the associated code for the manuscript, A Novel Approach to Estimate Heritability. Heritability is the standard measure used to quantify the relative genetic contributions to various phenotypes, diseases, and conditions. In our paper, we describe a novel approach to quantitatively estimate broad sense heritability by assessing the magnitude of the secular trend in the incidence or prevalence of a specific phenotype or disease for a given population. The method, which we call “SHEST” (Secular Heritability ESTimate), is based on the premise that large-scale secular trends over a short period of time (one to two generations) are indicative of a weakly heritable condition while long-term invariant incidence or prevalence is indicative of a strongly heritable condition.
- The expected file type format for SHEST_calculator.ipynb a comma-seperated-values file (extention:
.csv) - The file should have two columns.
- Column 1 contains the years while column 2 contains the incidence or prevalence values.
- Rows 1 and 2 are used to store the data source(s)
- For examples of acceptable .csv files, refer to relhajj/SHEST-heritability/csvs which contains the .csv files used to estimate heritability through the SHEST method introduced in our manuscript.
- For details of where we obtained the data contained in each individual .csv file, please refer to either our manuscript, or our supporting information (which explains the rationale behind our data choices).
- The data used to estimate the heritability for eye color and hair color through our SHEST method was collected by our team and is publically available (found at relhajj/SHEST_data).
Authors: Rehab El-Hajj (rehab.elhajj@ucalgary.ca), Sarah Davis (sdavis1@ualberta.ca), David Wishart (dwishart@ualberta.ca)