Efficient analysis of large datasets and sex bias with ADMIXTURE

Background: A number of large genomic datasets are being generated for studies of human ancestry and diseases. The ADMIXTURE program is commonly used to infer individual ancestry from genomic data. Results: We describe two improvements to the ADMIXTURE software. The first enables ADMIXTURE to infer ancestry for a new set of individuals using cluster allele frequencies from a reference set of individuals. Using data from the 1000 Genomes Project, we show that this allows ADMIXTURE to infer ancestry for 10,920 individuals in a few hours (a 5x speedup). This mode also allows ADMIXTURE to correctly estimate individual ancestry and allele frequencies from a set of related individuals. The second modification allows ADMIXTURE to correctly handle X-chromosome (and other haploid) data from both males and females. We demonstrate increased power to detect sex-biased admixture in African-American individuals from the 1000 Genomes project using this extension. Conclusions: These modifications make ADMIXTURE more efficient and versatile, allowing users to extract more information from large genomic datasets.