Improving the Estimation of Bacterial Allele Frequencies

Eric C. Anderson and Paul A. Scheet

A Letter Submitted to Genetics

Rannala et al. (2000) develop a useful Poisson process model for estimating allele frequencies in bacterial populations using presence/absence data on infected hosts. However, they also show that the estimators they derive suffer from bias. In this letter we derive different estimators from the same model and show these estimators to be preferable.