Bias-Variance Tradeoffs in Recombination Rate Estimation

In 2013, we and coauthors published a paper characterizing rates of recombination within the 2.1-megabase garnet-scalloped (g-sd) region of the Drosophila melanogaster X chromosome. To extract the signal of recombination in our high-throughput sequence data, we adopted a nonparametric smoothing procedure, reducing variance at the cost of biasing individual recombination rates. In doing so, we sacrificed accuracy to gain precision-precision that allowed us to detect recombination rate heterogeneity. Negotiating the bias-variance tradeoff enabled us to resolve significant variation in the frequency of crossing over across the garnet-scalloped region.