Eigensoft

Eigensoft is a software tool that helps researchers detect and correct population stratification in disease studies. In population stratification, allele frequency differences between cases and controls occur due to systematic ancestry differences, leading to spurious associations and false positives in disease studies. The Eigensoft tool addresses this issue by using a method that explicitly models ancestry differences between cases and controls using principal components analysis.

This method results in a correction specific to a candidate marker's variation in frequency across ancestral populations. Doing so minimizes spurious associations while maximizing the power to detect true associations. Eigensoft is designed to be a simple and efficient approach that can easily be applied to disease studies with hundreds of thousands of markers.

Using Eigensoft, researchers can avoid the pitfalls of population stratification and improve the accuracy of their disease studies.