To assess the accuracy of our posterior estimation of recombination rates, we compared the refined maps to maps generated using standard methods. The female and male genetic maps constructed with our method are in good agreement with previous pedigree-based maps24 (Supplementary Fig. 1), although it should be noted that we have reused the data use to generate these maps. A cleaner comparison can be made with the HapMap map15 generated from patterns of linkage disequilibrium (LD), where our sex-averaged refined map shows a Pearson r2>0.93 at the megabase scale (Fig. 1b). At the fine scale, where LD-based maps are expected to have higher resolution, the sex-averaged refined map shows an increased correlation to the HapMap map compared to the unrefined map and to the earlier pedigree-based maps. For example, at the 5 kb scale, the Pearson correlation between our map and the HapMap map is r2=0.62, whereas for the unrefined map it is 0.49, and respectively 0.46 and 0.44 for the Campbell et al.2 map and the deCODE 2010 map4. Similarly, the refined map shows improved correlation at scales below 200 kb to the LD-based CEU map generated from 1,000 Genomes Project Illumina OMNI array data16 (Supplementary Fig. 2b). Refinement also improves correlation for a refined Icelandic map constructed using data from Kong et al.7 only (Supplementary Fig. 3).