Composite measures of selection can improve the signal-to-noise ratio in genome scans

The growing wealth of genomic data is yielding new insights into the genetic basis of adaptation, but it also presents the challenge of extracting the relevant signal from multi-dimensional datasets. Different statistical approaches vary in their power to detect selection depending on the demographic history, type of selection, genetic architecture and experimental design.
Here, we develop and evaluate new approaches for combining results from multiple tests, including multivariate distance measures and methods for combining P-values. We evaluate these methods on (i) simulated landscape genetic data analysed for differentiation outliers and genetic-environment associations and (ii) empirical genomic data analysed for selective sweeps within dog breeds for loci known to be selected for during domestication. We also introduce and evaluate how robust statistical algorithms can be used for parameter estimation in statistical genomics.
On the simulated data, many of the composite measures ...