Fig. 2: REML and HE estimates across varying sample sizes in simulated data.
From: Assortative mating biases marker-based heritability estimators
a Comparison of HE regression and REML heritability estimates as functions of sample size for varying phenotypic mating correlation (\({r}_{{{{{{\rm{pheno}}}}}}}\)) and fixed panmictic heritability (\({h}_{0}^{2}=0.5\)) in simulated data. We computed multiple estimates per sample size for each estimator and parameter combination by applying estimators to independent sub-samples. Whereas HE regression estimates are upwardly biased independent of sample size, REML estimates slowly converge to the panmictic heritability as sample sizes increase. b Extended simulations demonstrating high-dimensional behavior of the REML estimator as a function of sample size. Forward time simulations required a larger population size (\(N_{{{\rm{sim}}}}=3\times {10}^{6}\)) to obtain samples of up to \(n={648}, \! {000}\) unrelated individuals. Obtaining REML estimates for samples larger than this was not computationally feasible, but the dashed red line shows predicted values for larger sample sizes extrapolated from a regression model including first and second order log-linear components. Results are consistent with theoretical predictions that the REML estimator converges to the panmictic heritability in very large samples.
