Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 1997 Mar;27(2):113-20.
doi: 10.1023/a:1025681223921.

The use of likelihood-based confidence intervals in genetic models

M C Neale  1 , M B Miller
Affiliations

The use of likelihood-based confidence intervals in genetic models

M C Neale et al. Behav Genet. 1997 Mar.

Abstract

This article describes the computation and relative merits of likelihood-based confidence intervals, compared to other measures of error in parameter estimates. Likelihood-based confidence intervals have the advantage of being asymmetric, which is often the case with structural equation models for genetically informative studies. We show how the package Mx provides confidence intervals for parameters and functions of parameters in the context of a simple additive genetic, common, and specific environment threshold model for binary data. Previously published contingency tables for major depression in adult female twins are used for illustration. The support for the model shows a marked skew as the additive genetic parameter is systematically varied from zero to one. The impact of allowing different prevalence rates in MZ vs. DZ twins is explored by fitting a model with separate threshold parameters and comparing the confidence intervals. Despite the improvement in fit of the different prevalence model, the confidence intervals on all parameters broaden, owing to their covariance.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources