Generating Simulated Nuclear Families for TDT Type Methods

Abstract

Transmission disequilibrium tests (TDT) is a well-known case-parents family-based method to detect the association between genetic polymorphisms and a disease phenotype. Various extensions of the TDT have been developed and widely applied in medical research. In this article, we introduced a simple simulation algorithm based on a transition model to generate general nuclear families rather than trios to simulate multiple tightly linked markers. The simulations show that the empirical distributions of the test statistics coincide with the expected distribution under the null hypothesis.