What can one chromosome tell us about human biogeographical ancestry?

We study the problem of predicting human biogeographical ancestry using genomic data. While continental level ancestry is relatively simple using genomic information, distinguishing between individuals from closely associated subpopulations (e.g., from the same continent) is still a difficult challenge. In particular, we focus on the case where the analysis is constrained to using single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from just one chromosome. We thus propose methods to construct such ancestry informative SNP panels, and assess the performance of such SNP panels from just one chromosome, for both continental-level and sub-population level ancestry prediction. We present results on the performance of the proposed methods, including a comparison with other related methods.