Detection of Quantitative Trait Loci in Presence of Phenotypic Contamination

Genes controlling a certain trait of organism is known as quantitative trait loci(QTL). The standard Interval mapping [8] is a popular way to scan the wholegenome for the evidence of QTLs. It searches a QTL within each intervalbetween two adjacent markers by performing likelihood ratio test (LRT).However, the standard Interval mapping (SIM) approach is not robust againstoutliers. An attempt is made to robustify SIM for QTL analysis by maximizing β-likelihood function using the EM like algorithm. We investigate the robustnessperformance of the proposed method in a comparison of SIM algorithm usingsynthetic datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed methodsignificantly improves the performance over the SIM approach for QTL mappingin presence of outliers; otherwise, it keeps equal performance.