AlphaImpute2: Fast and accurate pedigree and population based imputation for hundreds of thousands of individuals in livestock populations

In this paper we present a new imputation algorithm, AlphaImpute2, which performs fast and accurate pedigree and population based imputation for livestock populations of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Genetic imputation is a tool used in genetics to decrease the cost of genotyping a population, by genotyping a small number of individuals at high-density and the remaining individuals at low-density. Shared haplotype segments between the high-density and low-density individuals can then be used to fill in the missing genotypes of the low-density individuals. As the size of genetics datasets have grown, the computational cost of performing imputation has increased, particularly in agricultural breeding programs where there might be hundreds of thousands of genotyped individuals. To address this issue, we present a new imputation algorithm, AlphaImpute2, which performs population imputation by using a particle based approximation to the Li and Stephens which exploits the Positional Burrows Wheeler Transform, and performs pedigree imputation using an approximate version of multi-locus iterative peeling. We tested AlphaImpute2 on four simulated datasets designed to mimic the pedigrees found in a real pig breeding program. We compared AlphaImpute2 to AlphaImpute, AlphaPeel, findhap version 4, and Beagle 5.1. We found that AlphaImpute2 had the highest accuracy, with an accuracy of 0.993 for low-density individuals on the pedigree with 107,000 individuals, compared to an accuracy of 0.942 for Beagle 5.1, 0.940 for AlphaImpute, and 0.801 for findhap. AlphaImpute2 was also the fastest software tested, with a runtime of 105 minutes a pedigree of 107,000 individuals and 5,000 markers was 105 minutes, compared to 190 minutes for Beagle 5.1, 395 minutes for findhap, and 7,859 minutes AlphaImpute. We believe that AlphaImpute2 will enable fast and accurate large scale imputation for agricultural populations as they scale to hundreds of thousands or millions of genotyped individuals.