We estimated relationships based on diallelic markers with comparable accuracy to those based on multiallelic markers. As we showed, the 5,000 and 16,977 marker panels had similar variances for kinship estimates, indicating that all markers in the dense SNP panel are not necessarily needed. The subset of markers that were spaced suffciently far apart provides enough information for estimating kinship coefficients and removes the need to account for linkage-disequilibrium (LD) among SNP dense markers. We can therefore consider SNP markers as the simplest case of multiallelic markers and the analysis performed on multiallelic markers in this study can be applicable and valid to SNP markers as well. Computation time for SNPs was also not exorbitant, compared to smaller number of multiallelic markers, even for our R code used to carry out these analyses. Computation time could be improved by carrying out some computations with C or C++.
