2023 Articles

ERStruct: a fast Python package for inferring the number of top principal components from whole genome sequencing data

Yang, Zhiliang; Xu, Yuyang; Yao, Minhao; Wang, Gao; Liu, Zhonghua

Background
Large-scale multi-ethnic DNA sequencing data is increasingly available owing to decreasing cost of modern sequencing technologies. Inference of the population structure with such sequencing data is fundamentally important. However, the ultra-dimensionality and complicated linkage disequilibrium patterns across the whole genome make it challenging to infer population structure using traditional principal component analysis based methods and software.

Results
We present the ERStruct Python Package, which enables the inference of population structure using whole-genome sequencing data. By leveraging parallel computing and GPU acceleration, our package achieves significant improvements in the speed of matrix operations for large-scale data. Additionally, our package features adaptive data splitting capabilities to facilitate computation on GPUs with limited memory.

Conclusion
Our Python package ERStruct is an efficient and user-friendly tool for estimating the number of top informative principal components that capture population structure from whole genome sequencing data.