how to understand negative heritability or heritability values that are greater than 1 or even 2

[zhuhuanhuan0308]

Dear LDSC developers,

I am trying to use LDSC to get the genetic correlation of many traits in a single sample. First, I ran --h2 to get the heritability for each trait, but often times I got negative observed heritability (e.g., -0.8784) or very large values (e.g., 2.6763).

Could you please explain why such values were generated?

Thank you very much for your time!
Sophie

[RezaJF]

I have the same question, seems like this is relevant!
https://www.genetics.org/content/215/2/343

[zhuhuanhuan0308]

I have the same question, seems like this is relevant!
https://www.genetics.org/content/215/2/343

Hi, RezaJF

Thank you for your information!
I found another software (https://github.com/zhenin/HDL/wiki/Installation-and-update) which was developed recently and claimed that they have smaller estimates variance compared to LDSC.
When I run this software based on my data, it produced errors saying that the sample size is too small (n = 400), I think this may be one reason why LDSC gave negative values.

Thanks,
Sophie