High-grading bias: subtle problems with assessing power of selected subsets of loci for population assignment

Molecular Ecology
Robin S Waples

Abstract

Recognition of the importance of cross-validation ('any technique or instance of assessing how the results of a statistical analysis will generalize to an independent dataset'; Wiktionary, en.wiktionary.org) is one reason that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires all investment products to carry some variation of the disclaimer, 'Past performance is no guarantee of future results.' Even a cursory examination of financial behaviour, however, demonstrates that this warning is regularly ignored, even by those who understand what an independent dataset is. In the natural sciences, an analogue to predicting future returns for an investment strategy is predicting power of a particular algorithm to perform with new data. Once again, the key to developing an unbiased assessment of future performance is through testing with independent data--that is, data that were in no way involved in developing the method in the first place. A 'gold-standard' approach to cross-validation is to divide the data into two parts, one used to develop the algorithm, the other used to test its performance. Because this approach substantially reduces the sample size that can be used in constructing the algorithm, researchers often try other va...Continue Reading

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Citations

Nov 30, 2012·Molecular Ecology·E GuichouxR J Petit
Jan 1, 2012·Evolutionary Applications·Michael A RusselloPaul J Askey
Apr 1, 2011·Molecular Ecology Resources·Sten KarlssonKjetil Hindar
Jun 12, 2018·The Journal of Heredity·Robin S WaplesL Scott Mills
Aug 30, 2019·Evolutionary Applications·Julian R DupuisScott M Geib
Mar 5, 2019·Evolutionary Applications·Simon BernatchezMartin A Mallet
Jun 29, 2021·Evolutionary Applications·Brenda LarisonKristen Ruegg
Jul 30, 2021·Scientific Reports·Dora HenriquesM Alice Pinto

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