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Comparison of multimarker logistic regression models, with application to a genomewide scan of schizophrenia.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are a widely used study design for detecting genetic causes of complex diseases. Current studies provide good coverage of common causal SNPs, but not rare ones. A popular method to detect rare causal variants is haplotype testing. A disadvantage of this approach is that many parameters are estimated simultaneously, which can mean a loss of power and slower fitting to large datasets.Haplotype testing effectively tests both the allele frequencies and the linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure of the data. LD has previously been shown to be mostly attributable to LD between adjacent SNPs. We propose a generalised linear model (GLM) which models the effects of each SNP in a region as well as the statistical interactions between adjacent pairs. This is compared to two other commonly used multimarker GLMs: one with a main-effect parameter for each SNP; one with a parameter for each haplotype.We show the haplotype model has higher power for rare untyped causal SNPs, the main-effects model has higher power for common untyped causal SNPs, and the proposed model generally has power in between the two others. We show that the relative power of the three methods is dependent on the number of marker haplotypes the causal allele is present on, which depends on the age of the mutation. Except in the case of a common causal variant in high LD with markers, all three multimarker models are superior in power to single-SNP tests.Including the adjacent statistical interactions results in lower inflation in test statistics when a realistic level of population stratification is present in a dataset.Using the multimarker models, we analyse data from the Molecular Genetics of Schizophrenia study. The multimarker models find potential associations that are not found by single-SNP tests. However, multimarker models also require stricter control of data quality since biases can have a larger inflationary effect on multimarker test statistics than on single-SNP test statistics.Analysing a GWAS with multimarker models can yield candidate regions which may contain rare untyped causal variants. This is useful for increasing prior odds of association in future whole-genome sequence analyses.

SUBMITTER: Wason JM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2949738 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Comparison of multimarker logistic regression models, with application to a genomewide scan of schizophrenia.

Wason James M S JM Dudbridge Frank F

BMC genetics 20100909

<h4>Background</h4>Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are a widely used study design for detecting genetic causes of complex diseases. Current studies provide good coverage of common causal SNPs, but not rare ones. A popular method to detect rare causal variants is haplotype testing. A disadvantage of this approach is that many parameters are estimated simultaneously, which can mean a loss of power and slower fitting to large datasets.Haplotype testing effectively tests both the allele frequ ...[more]

PMID: 20828390

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Project description:BackgroundLogistic random effects models are a popular tool to analyze multilevel also called hierarchical data with a binary or ordinal outcome. Here, we aim to compare different statistical software implementations of these models.MethodsWe used individual patient data from 8509 patients in 231 centers with moderate and severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) enrolled in eight Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and three observational studies. We fitted logistic random effects regression models with the 5-point Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) as outcome, both dichotomized as well as ordinal, with center and/or trial as random effects, and as covariates age, motor score, pupil reactivity or trial. We then compared the implementations of frequentist and Bayesian methods to estimate the fixed and random effects. Frequentist approaches included R (lme4), Stata (GLLAMM), SAS (GLIMMIX and NLMIXED), MLwiN ([R]IGLS) and MIXOR, Bayesian approaches included WinBUGS, MLwiN (MCMC), R package MCMCglmm and SAS experimental procedure MCMC.Three data sets (the full data set and two sub-datasets) were analysed using basically two logistic random effects models with either one random effect for the center or two random effects for center and trial. For the ordinal outcome in the full data set also a proportional odds model with a random center effect was fitted.ResultsThe packages gave similar parameter estimates for both the fixed and random effects and for the binary (and ordinal) models for the main study and when based on a relatively large number of level-1 (patient level) data compared to the number of level-2 (hospital level) data. However, when based on relatively sparse data set, i.e. when the numbers of level-1 and level-2 data units were about the same, the frequentist and Bayesian approaches showed somewhat different results. The software implementations differ considerably in flexibility, computation time, and usability. There are also differences in the availability of additional tools for model evaluation, such as diagnostic plots. The experimental SAS (version 9.2) procedure MCMC appeared to be inefficient.ConclusionsOn relatively large data sets, the different software implementations of logistic random effects regression models produced similar results. Thus, for a large data set there seems to be no explicit preference (of course if there is no preference from a philosophical point of view) for either a frequentist or Bayesian approach (if based on vague priors). The choice for a particular implementation may largely depend on the desired flexibility, and the usability of the package. For small data sets the random effects variances are difficult to estimate. In the frequentist approaches the MLE of this variance was often estimated zero with a standard error that is either zero or could not be determined, while for Bayesian methods the estimates could depend on the chosen "non-informative" prior of the variance parameter. The starting value for the variance parameter may be also critical for the convergence of the Markov chain.

Dataset Information

Comparison of multimarker logistic regression models, with application to a genomewide scan of schizophrenia.

Publications

Comparison of multimarker logistic regression models, with application to a genomewide scan of schizophrenia.

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