PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Richard Border
AU  - Sean O’Rourke
AU  - Teresa de Candia
AU  - Michael E. Goddard
AU  - Peter M. Visscher
AU  - Loic Yengo
AU  - Mathew Jones
AU  - Matthew C. Keller
TI  - Assortative Mating Biases Marker-based Heritability Estimators
AID  - 10.1101/2021.03.18.436091
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.03.18.436091
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/20/2021.03.18.436091.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/20/2021.03.18.436091.full
AB  - Many complex traits are subject to assortative mating (AM), with recent molecular genetic findings confirming longstanding theoretical predictions that AM alters genetic architecture by inducing long range dependence across causal variants. However, all marker-based heritability estimators assume mating is random. We provide mathematical and simulation-based evidence demonstrating that both method-of-moments estimators and likelihood-based estimators produce biased estimates in the presence of AM and that common approaches to account for population structure fail to mitigate this bias. Then, examining height and educational attainment in the UK Biobank, we demonstrate that these biases affect real world traits. Finally, we derive corrected heritability estimators for traits under equilibrium AM.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.