A note on testing the Hardy-Weinberg law across strata.

The problem of testing the Hardy-Weinberg law when the data are stratified in K strata is considered. Previous methods lose power when the departure from the law is irregular from stratum to stratum. Two methods based on the squared distance are proposed to overcome this problem. Simulations show that the new methods can have a dramatic improvement over the previous methods. The methods are applied to red cell glyoxalase genotype data from populations in India.