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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Orcadians, the K15 and the calculator effect


Judging by the Google search terms that are bringing traffic to this and my other blogs, a total newb to the scene is analyzing the Orcadian samples from the HGDP at GEDmatch with my K15 test.

Please keep in mind that you will not see coherent results for many of the academic samples available online when using my tests.

That's because I used these samples to source the allele frequencies for the tests. As a result, their ancestry proportions will often be very different from those of other samples from the same ethnic groups that were not used in this way.

I call this problem the calculator effect, and it's described in my blog posts at the links below:

Beware the "calculator effect"

Ancient genomes and the calculator effect

The calculator effect is a very serious problem for most tests, but as far as my tests are concerned, it doesn't affect anyone except the above mentioned academic samples.