Statistical analysis of uniparental disomy data using hidden Markov models

Genetic studies of uniparental disomy (UPD) employing many markers have helped geneticists to gain a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying nondisjunction. However, most existing methods cannot simultaneously analyze all genetic markers and consistently incorporate crossover interference; they thus fail to make the most use of genetic information in the data. In the present article, we describe a hidden Markov model for multilocus uniparental disomy data. This method is based on the chi-square model for the crossover process and can simultaneously incorporate all marker information including untyped and uninformative markers. We then apply this novel method to analyze a set of UPD15 data.