Dataset Information

Exploring the performance of Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction in large scale SNP studies and in the presence of genetic heterogeneity among epistatic disease models.

ABSTRACT:

Background/aims

In genetic studies of complex disease a consideration for the investigator is detection of joint effects. The Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) algorithm searches for these effects with an exhaustive approach. Previously unknown aspects of MDR performance were the power to detect interactive effects given large numbers of non-model loci or varying degrees of heterogeneity among multiple epistatic disease models.

Methods

To address the performance with many non-model loci, datasets of 500 cases and 500 controls with 100 to 10,000 SNPs were simulated for two-locus models, and one hundred 500-case/500-control datasets with 100 and 500 SNPs were simulated for three-locus models. Multiple levels of locus heterogeneity were simulated in several sample sizes.

Results

These results show MDR is robust to locus heterogeneity when the definition of power is not as conservative as in previous simulation studies where all model loci were required to be found by the method. The results also indicate that MDR performance is related more strongly to broad-sense heritability than sample size and is not greatly affected by non-model loci.

Conclusions

A study in which a population with high heritability estimates is sampled predisposes the MDR study to success more than a larger ascertainment in a population with smaller estimates.

SUBMITTER: Edwards TL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3078287 | biostudies-literature | 2009

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Exploring the performance of Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction in large scale SNP studies and in the presence of genetic heterogeneity among epistatic disease models.

Edwards Todd L TL Lewis Kenneth K Velez Digna R DR Dudek Scott S Ritchie Marylyn D MD

Human heredity 20081215 3

<h4>Background/aims</h4>In genetic studies of complex disease a consideration for the investigator is detection of joint effects. The Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) algorithm searches for these effects with an exhaustive approach. Previously unknown aspects of MDR performance were the power to detect interactive effects given large numbers of non-model loci or varying degrees of heterogeneity among multiple epistatic disease models.<h4>Methods</h4>To address the performance with many ...[more]

PMID: 19077437

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Identifying high-order genetics associations with non-additive (i.e. epistatic) effects in population-based studies of common human diseases is a computational challenge. Multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) is a machine learning method that was designed specifically for this problem. The goal of the present study was to apply MDR to mining high-order epistatic interactions in a population-based genetic study of tuberculosis (TB). RESULTS:The study used a previously published data set consisting of 19 candidate single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 321 pulmonary TB cases and 347 healthy controls from Guniea-Bissau in Africa. The ReliefF algorithm was applied first to generate a smaller set of the five most informative SNPs. MDR with 10-fold cross-validation was then applied to look at all possible combinations of two, three, four and five SNPs. The MDR model with the best testing accuracy (TA) consisted of SNPs rs2305619, rs187084, and rs11465421 (TA?=?0.588) in PTX3, TLR9 and DC-Sign, respectively. A general 1000-fold permutation test of the null hypothesis of no association confirmed the statistical significance of the model (p?=?0.008). An additional 1000-fold permutation test designed specifically to test the linear null hypothesis that the association effects are only additive confirmed the presence of non-additive (i.e. nonlinear) or epistatic effects (p?=?0.013). An independent information-gain measure corroborated these results with a third-order epistatic interaction that was stronger than any lower-order associations. CONCLUSIONS:We have identified statistically significant evidence for a three-way epistatic interaction that is associated with susceptibility to TB. This interaction is stronger than any previously described one-way or two-way associations. This study highlights the importance of using machine learning methods that are designed to embrace, rather than ignore, the complexity of common diseases such as TB. We recommend future studies of the genetics of TB take into account the possibility that high-order epistatic interactions might play an important role in disease susceptibility.

Project description:Complex human diseases do not have a clear inheritance pattern, and it is expected that risk involves multiple genes with modest effects acting independently or interacting. Major challenges for the identification of genetic effects are genetic heterogeneity and difficulty in analyzing high-order interactions. To address these challenges, we present MDR-Phenomics, a novel approach based on the multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) method, to detect genetic effects in pedigree data by integration of phenotypic covariates (PCs) that may reflect genetic heterogeneity. The P value of the test is calculated using a permutation test adjusted for multiple tests. To validate MDR-Phenomics, we compared it with two MDR-based methods: (1) traditional MDR pedigree disequilibrium test (PDT) without consideration of PCs (MDR-PDT) and (2) stratified phenotype (SP) analysis based on PCs, with use of MDR-PDT with a Bonferroni adjustment (SP-MDR). Using computer simulations, we examined the statistical power and type I error of the different approaches under several genetic models and sampling scenarios. We conclude that MDR-Phenomics is more powerful than MDR-PDT and SP-MDR when there is genetic heterogeneity, and the statistical power is affected by sample size and the number of PC levels. We further compared MDR-Phenomics with conditional logistic regression (CLR) for testing interactions across single or multiple loci with consideration of PC. The results show that CLR with PC has only slightly smaller power than does MDR-Phenomics for single-locus analysis but has considerably smaller power for multiple loci. Finally, by applying MDR-Phenomics to autism, a complex disease in which multiple genes are believed to confer risk, we attempted to identify multiple gene effects in two candidate genes of interest--the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4) and the integrin beta 3 gene (ITGB3) on chromosome 17. Analyzing four markers in SLC6A4 and four markers in ITGB3 in 117 white family triads with autism and using sex of the proband as a PC, we found significant interaction between two markers--rs1042173 in SLC6A4 and rs3809865 in ITGB3.

Project description:BackgroundIt is hypothesized that common, complex diseases may be due to complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors, which are difficult to detect in high-dimensional data using traditional statistical approaches. Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) is the most commonly used data-mining method to detect epistatic interactions. In all data-mining methods, it is important to consider internal validation procedures to obtain prediction estimates to prevent model over-fitting and reduce potential false positive findings. Currently, MDR utilizes cross-validation for internal validation. In this study, we incorporate the use of a three-way split (3WS) of the data in combination with a post-hoc pruning procedure as an alternative to cross-validation for internal model validation to reduce computation time without impairing performance. We compare the power to detect true disease causing loci using MDR with both 5- and 10-fold cross-validation to MDR with 3WS for a range of single-locus and epistatic disease models. Additionally, we analyze a dataset in HIV immunogenetics to demonstrate the results of the two strategies on real data.ResultsMDR with 3WS is computationally approximately five times faster than 5-fold cross-validation. The power to find the exact true disease loci without detecting false positive loci is higher with 5-fold cross-validation than with 3WS before pruning. However, the power to find the true disease causing loci in addition to false positive loci is equivalent to the 3WS. With the incorporation of a pruning procedure after the 3WS, the power of the 3WS approach to detect only the exact disease loci is equivalent to that of MDR with cross-validation. In the real data application, the cross-validation and 3WS analyses indicate the same two-locus model.ConclusionsOur results reveal that the performance of the two internal validation methods is equivalent with the use of pruning procedures. The specific pruning procedure should be chosen understanding the trade-off between identifying all relevant genetic effects but including false positives and missing important genetic factors. This implies 3WS may be a powerful and computationally efficient approach to screen for epistatic effects, and could be used to identify candidate interactions in large-scale genetic studies.

Project description:BackgroundRecently, one of the greatest challenges in genome-wide association studies is to detect gene-gene and/or gene-environment interactions for common complex human diseases. Ritchie et al. (2001) proposed multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) method for interaction analysis. MDR is a combinatorial approach to reduce multi-locus genotypes into high-risk and low-risk groups. Although MDR has been widely used for case-control studies with binary phenotypes, several extensions have been proposed. One of these methods, a generalized MDR (GMDR) proposed by Lou et al. (2007), allows adjusting for covariates and applying to both dichotomous and continuous phenotypes. GMDR uses the residual score of a generalized linear model of phenotypes to assign either high-risk or low-risk group, while MDR uses the ratio of cases to controls.MethodsIn this study, we propose multivariate GMDR, an extension of GMDR for multivariate phenotypes. Jointly analysing correlated multivariate phenotypes may have more power to detect susceptible genes and gene-gene interactions. We construct generalized estimating equations (GEE) with multivariate phenotypes to extend generalized linear models. Using the score vectors from GEE we discriminate high-risk from low-risk groups. We applied the multivariate GMDR method to the blood pressure data of the 7,546 subjects from the Korean Association Resource study: systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). We compare the results of multivariate GMDR for SBP and DBP to the results from separate univariate GMDR for SBP and DBP, respectively. We also applied the multivariate GMDR method to the repeatedly measured hypertension status from 5,466 subjects and compared its result with those of univariate GMDR at each time point.ResultsResults from the univariate GMDR and multivariate GMDR in two-locus model with both blood pressures and hypertension phenotypes indicate best combinations of SNPs whose interaction has significant association with risk for high blood pressures or hypertension. Although the test balanced accuracy (BA) of multivariate analysis was not always greater than that of univariate analysis, the multivariate BAs were more stable with smaller standard deviations.ConclusionsIn this study, we have developed multivariate GMDR method using GEE approach. It is useful to use multivariate GMDR with correlated multiple phenotypes of interests.

Dataset Information

Exploring the performance of Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction in large scale SNP studies and in the presence of genetic heterogeneity among epistatic disease models.

Background/aims

Methods

Results

Conclusions

Publications

Exploring the performance of Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction in large scale SNP studies and in the presence of genetic heterogeneity among epistatic disease models.

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