Dodecad Project II

I talked about the Dodecad Project last time. Dienekes also did some cluster analysis using mclust.

When he classified everybody into 48 clusters, I showed up almost all alone in cluster 21. Only one other member who is a Bihari Brahmin had a 50% chance of belonging in my cluster.

With 56 clusters, I am classified with 9 Sindhis (out of a reference population total of 24) and the same Bihari guy (who now has 99% chance of belongign in this cluster).

It looked like I was an outlier and when Dienekes tested for outlier data samples he found me among them.

With 64 clusters, I am again an outlier, though I am classified with a few Punjabis and 20/24 reference Sindhis and 10/22 reference Pathans. I am likely making their cluster not a good tight fit.

For 63 cluster analysis, the outlier status remains and the story is about the same as with 64 clusters.

More interesting was when Dienekes analyzed just South Asians. In his cluster analysis, I was classified with the 3 Punjabis in his project as well as the following reference population samples: 2 out of 25 Singapore Indians, 1 out of 24 Balochi, 18 out of 24 Sindhi, and 9 out of 22 Pathan.

His admixture results for me in this South Asian analysis were:

Pakistan 39.8
Indian 22.4
West Asian 16.3
Dagestan 11.8
European 2.8
North Kannadi 2.2
Southeast Asian 1.9
Irula 1.8
Siberian 1.1

An interesting pattern I have noticed is that my European admixture percentage is generally lower than other Punjabis. When the European is divided into North and South, I have less North European admixture than a typical Sindhi, Punjabi or Pathan but more South European than those groups.

The final analysis from Dodecad is a fun one:

Using Pakistani Punjabis from Xing et al. (2010) and Behar et al. (2010) Egyptians as references requires me to drop the number of markers to ~38k, but the result of the supervised ADMIXTURE analysis is 77.4% Punjabi and 22.6% Egyptian, which seems compatible with what he expected.

Basically, Dienekes used only 25 Punjabis and 12 Egyptians as reference and then tried to estimate my proportion of these two populations. Of course, the assumption is that these two are my only ancestries. Interestingly, this is very close to what I expected. I plan to do this same analysis with several different reference populations and see what I get.

By Zack

Dad, gadget guy, bookworm, political animal, global nomad, cyclist, hiker, tennis player, photographer