Eurasia, ADMIXTURE supervised & unsupervised

Eurasia, ADMIXTURE supervised & unsupervised

After yesterday’s post I thought it might be useful to see how running ADMIXTURE in different modes would impact the outcomes. Probably the major reason I wish more people would use this software is that they’d see that this program is just a program, and stop assuming its outputs to be divine writ. Over the years I’ve noticed a tendency of individuals anchoring to one specific plot in one specific paper as if it supported their argument definitively. Running ADMIXTURE or PCA plots via EIGENSOFT makes you very aware of how useless this sort of stance is.

Today I’ve limited the population set to be “South Asia-centric.” Specifically, there are only a few Middle Eastern, European, and East Asian populations, along with one African population. The goal is to figure out how different South Asian groups relate to these non-South Asian groups. First, I ran ADMIXTURE K = 2 to K = 9. Then, I ran ADMIXTURE in “supervised” mode for K = 9. Basically, I set nine populations as as “pure” references. They were:

– Tamil Dalit
– French Basque
– Lithuanian
– Adygei
– Palestinian
– Buryat (Altaic region)
– Dai (South Asian)
– Papuan
– Luhya …

Razib Khan