Dataset Information

The Generalized Higher Criticism for Testing SNP-Set Effects in Genetic Association Studies.

ABSTRACT: It is of substantial interest to study the effects of genes, genetic pathways, and networks on the risk of complex diseases. These genetic constructs each contain multiple SNPs, which are often correlated and function jointly, and might be large in number. However, only a sparse subset of SNPs in a genetic construct is generally associated with the disease of interest. In this article, we propose the generalized higher criticism (GHC) to test for the association between an SNP set and a disease outcome. The higher criticism is a test traditionally used in high-dimensional signal detection settings when marginal test statistics are independent and the number of parameters is very large. However, these assumptions do not always hold in genetic association studies, due to linkage disequilibrium among SNPs and the finite number of SNPs in an SNP set in each genetic construct. The proposed GHC overcomes the limitations of the higher criticism by allowing for arbitrary correlation structures among the SNPs in an SNP-set, while performing accurate analytic p-value calculations for any finite number of SNPs in the SNP-set. We obtain the detection boundary of the GHC test. We compared empirically using simulations the power of the GHC method with existing SNP-set tests over a range of genetic regions with varied correlation structures and signal sparsity. We apply the proposed methods to analyze the CGEM breast cancer genome-wide association study. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

SUBMITTER: Barnett I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5517103 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The Generalized Higher Criticism for Testing SNP-Set Effects in Genetic Association Studies.

Barnett Ian I Mukherjee Rajarshi R Lin Xihong X

Journal of the American Statistical Association 20170503 517

It is of substantial interest to study the effects of genes, genetic pathways, and networks on the risk of complex diseases. These genetic constructs each contain multiple SNPs, which are often correlated and function jointly, and might be large in number. However, only a sparse subset of SNPs in a genetic construct is generally associated with the disease of interest. In this article, we propose the generalized higher criticism (GHC) to test for the association between an SNP set and a disease ...[more]

PMID: 28736464

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundThe typical objective of Genome-wide association (GWA) studies is to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and corresponding genes with the strongest evidence of association (the 'most-significant SNPs/genes' approach). Borrowing ideas from micro-array data analysis, we propose a new method, named RS-SNP, for detecting sets of genes enriched in SNPs moderately associated to the phenotype. RS-SNP assesses whether the number of significant SNPs, with p-value P ? ?, belonging to a given SNP set S is statistically significant. The rationale of proposed method is that two kinds of null hypotheses are taken into account simultaneously. In the first null model the genotype and the phenotype are assumed to be independent random variables and the null distribution is the probability of the number of significant SNPs in S greater than observed by chance. The second null model assumes the number of significant SNPs in S depends on the size of and not on the identity of the SNPs in . Statistical significance is assessed using non-parametric permutation tests.ResultsWe applied RS-SNP to the Crohn's disease (CD) data set collected by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) and compared the results with GENGEN, an approach recently proposed in literature. The enrichment analysis using RS-SNP and the set of pathways contained in the MSigDB C2 CP pathway collection highlighted 86 pathways rich in SNPs weakly associated to CD. Of these, 47 were also indicated to be significant by GENGEN. Similar results were obtained using the MSigDB C5 pathway collection. Many of the pathways found to be enriched by RS-SNP have a well-known connection to CD and often with inflammatory diseases.ConclusionsThe proposed method is a valuable alternative to other techniques for enrichment analysis of SNP sets. It is well founded from a theoretical and statistical perspective. Moreover, the experimental comparison with GENGEN highlights that it is more robust with respect to false positive findings.

Dataset Information

The Generalized Higher Criticism for Testing SNP-Set Effects in Genetic Association Studies.

Publications

The Generalized Higher Criticism for Testing SNP-Set Effects in Genetic Association Studies.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets