Abstract
The problem of testing the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) when the data are stratified in several strata is considered. In previous methods, null hypothesis is that HWE holds and alternative hypothesis is that HWE does not hold. But these methods cannot test the HWE positively. Therefore, we formulate the test of the HWE as the problem of testing equivalence. Considering an odds ratio as the measure of disequilibrium, it is assumed that the ratio is common across strata. We propose two tests based on the trinomial distribution and quadrinomial distribution. It is shown that those tests are asymptotically equivalent. Those methods are applied to practical data for illustration.
