Erlang renewal models for genetic recombination

Abstract

Erlang renewal models, also called chi-squared models, provide a tractable model for genetic recombination that exhibits positive interference. Closed form expressions for multilocus probabilities are derived for the crossover process when it is a renewal process with the distance between crossovers modeled by a Erlang distribution. These expressions yield explicit formulas for the map functions, coincidence functions and distributions of the identity-by-descent process, giving exact results for a class of models that better model observed biological data.