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A penalized robust method for identifying gene-environment interactions.

ABSTRACT: In high-throughput studies, an important objective is to identify gene-environment interactions associated with disease outcomes and phenotypes. Many commonly adopted methods assume specific parametric or semiparametric models, which may be subject to model misspecification. In addition, they usually use significance level as the criterion for selecting important interactions. In this study, we adopt the rank-based estimation, which is much less sensitive to model specification than some of the existing methods and includes several commonly encountered data and models as special cases. Penalization is adopted for the identification of gene-environment interactions. It achieves simultaneous estimation and identification and does not rely on significance level. For computation feasibility, a smoothed rank estimation is further proposed. Simulation shows that under certain scenarios, for example, with contaminated or heavy-tailed data, the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing alternatives with more accurate identification. We analyze a lung cancer prognosis study with gene expression measurements under the AFT (accelerated failure time) model. The proposed method identifies interactions different from those using the alternatives. Some of the identified genes have important implications.

SUBMITTER: Shi X

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4356211 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A penalized robust method for identifying gene-environment interactions.

Shi Xingjie X Liu Jin J Huang Jian J Zhou Yong Y Xie Yang Y Ma Shuangge S

Genetic epidemiology 20140224 3

In high-throughput studies, an important objective is to identify gene-environment interactions associated with disease outcomes and phenotypes. Many commonly adopted methods assume specific parametric or semiparametric models, which may be subject to model misspecification. In addition, they usually use significance level as the criterion for selecting important interactions. In this study, we adopt the rank-based estimation, which is much less sensitive to model specification than some of the ...[more]

PMID: 24616063

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Project description:Gene-environment (G × E) interactions are biologically important for a wide range of environmental exposures and clinical outcomes. Because of the large number of potential interactions in genomewide association data, the standard approach fits one model per G × E interaction with multiple hypothesis correction (MHC) used to control the type I error rate. Although sometimes effective, using one model per candidate G × E interaction test has two important limitations: low power due to MHC and omitted variable bias. To avoid the coefficient estimation bias associated with independent models, researchers have used penalized regression methods to jointly test all main effects and interactions in a single regression model. Although penalized regression supports joint analysis of all interactions, can be used with hierarchical constraints, and offers excellent predictive performance, it cannot assess the statistical significance of G × E interactions or compute meaningful estimates of effect size. To address the challenge of low power, researchers have separately explored screening-testing, or two-stage, methods in which the set of potential G × E interactions is first filtered and then tested for interactions with MHC only applied to the tests actually performed in the second stage. Although two-stage methods are statistically valid and effective at improving power, they still test multiple separate models and so are impacted by MHC and biased coefficient estimation. To remedy the challenges of both poor power and omitted variable bias encountered with traditional G × E interaction detection methods, we propose a novel approach that combines elements of screening-testing and hierarchical penalized regression. Specifically, our proposed method uses, in the first stage, an elastic net-penalized multiple logistic regression model to jointly estimate either the marginal association filter statistic or the gene-environment correlation filter statistic for all candidate genetic markers. In the second stage, a single multiple logistic regression model is used to jointly assess marginal terms and G × E interactions for all genetic markers that pass the first stage filter. A single likelihood-ratio test is used to determine whether any of the interactions are statistically significant. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method relative to alternative G × E detection methods on a bladder cancer data set.

Dataset Information

A penalized robust method for identifying gene-environment interactions.

Publications

A penalized robust method for identifying gene-environment interactions.

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