A mixture distribution approach for assessing genetic impact from twin study

Abstract

This work was motivated by a twin study with the goal of assessing the genetic control of immune traits. We propose a mixture bivariate distribution to model twin data where the underlying order within a pair is unclear. Though estimation from mixture distribution is usually subject to low convergence rate, the combined likelihood, which is constructed over monozygotic and dizygotic twins combined, reaches root-n consistency and allows effective statistical inference on the genetic impact. The method is applicable to general unordered pairs.