Abstract Background Groups of distantly related individuals who share a short segment of their genome identical-by-descent (IBD) can provide insights about rare traits and diseases in massive biobanks via a process called IBD mapping. Clustering algorithms play an important role in finding these groups. We set out to analyze the fitness of commonly used, fast and scalable clustering algorithms for IBD mapping applications. We designed a realistic benchmark for local IBD graphs and utilized it to compare clustering algorithms in terms of statistical power. We also investigated the effectiveness of common clustering metrics as replacements for statistical power. Results We simulated 3.4 million clusters across 850 experiments with varying cluster counts, false-positive, and false-negative rates. Infomap and Markov Clustering (MCL) community detection methods have high statistical power in most of the graphs, compared to greedy methods such as Louvain and Leiden. We demonstrate that standard clustering metrics, such as modularity, cannot predict statistical power of algorithms in IBD mapping applications, though they can help with simulating realistic benchmarks. We extend our findings to real datasets by analyzing 3 populations in the Population Architecture using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study with 51,000 members and 2 million shared segments on Chromosome 1, resulting in the extraction of 39 million local IBD clusters across three different populations in PAGE. We used cluster properties derived in PAGE to increase the accuracy of our simulations and comparison. Conclusions Markov Clustering produces a 30% increase in statistical power compared to the current state-of-art approach, while reducing runtime by 3 orders of magnitude; making it computationally tractable in modern large-scale genetic datasets. We provide an efficient implementation to enable clustering at scale for IBD mapping and poplation-based linkage for various populations and scenarios.

Selecting Clustering Algorithms for IBD Mapping