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Statistical power and utility of meta-analysis methods for cross-phenotype genome-wide association studies.

ABSTRACT: Advances in recent genome wide association studies (GWAS) suggest that pleiotropic effects on human complex traits are widespread. A number of classic and recent meta-analysis methods have been used to identify genetic loci with pleiotropic effects, but the overall performance of these methods is not well understood. In this work, we use extensive simulations and case studies of GWAS datasets to investigate the power and type-I error rates of ten meta-analysis methods. We specifically focus on three conditions commonly encountered in the studies of multiple traits: (1) extensive heterogeneity of genetic effects; (2) characterization of trait-specific association; and (3) inflated correlation of GWAS due to overlapping samples. Although the statistical power is highly variable under distinct study conditions, we found the superior power of several methods under diverse heterogeneity. In particular, classic fixed-effects model showed surprisingly good performance when a variant is associated with more than a half of study traits. As the number of traits with null effects increases, ASSET performed the best along with competitive specificity and sensitivity. With opposite directional effects, CPASSOC featured the first-rate power. However, caution is advised when using CPASSOC for studying genetically correlated traits with overlapping samples. We conclude with a discussion of unresolved issues and directions for future research.

SUBMITTER: Zhu Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5832233 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Statistical power and utility of meta-analysis methods for cross-phenotype genome-wide association studies.

Zhu Zhaozhong Z Anttila Verneri V Smoller Jordan W JW Lee Phil H PH

PloS one 20180301 3

Advances in recent genome wide association studies (GWAS) suggest that pleiotropic effects on human complex traits are widespread. A number of classic and recent meta-analysis methods have been used to identify genetic loci with pleiotropic effects, but the overall performance of these methods is not well understood. In this work, we use extensive simulations and case studies of GWAS datasets to investigate the power and type-I error rates of ten meta-analysis methods. We specifically focus on t ...[more]

PMID: 29494641

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Project description:Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) aim to identify genetic variants related to diseases by examining the associations between phenotypes and hundreds of thousands of genotyped markers. Because many genes are potentially involved in common diseases and a large number of markers are analyzed, it is crucial to devise an effective strategy to identify truly associated variants that have individual and/or interactive effects, while controlling false positives at the desired level. Although a number of model selection methods have been proposed in the literature, including marginal search, exhaustive search, and forward search, their relative performance has only been evaluated through limited simulations due to the lack of an analytical approach to calculating the power of these methods. This article develops a novel statistical approach for power calculation, derives accurate formulas for the power of different model selection strategies, and then uses the formulas to evaluate and compare these strategies in genetic model spaces. In contrast to previous studies, our theoretical framework allows for random genotypes, correlations among test statistics, and a false-positive control based on GWAS practice. After the accuracy of our analytical results is validated through simulations, they are utilized to systematically evaluate and compare the performance of these strategies in a wide class of genetic models. For a specific genetic model, our results clearly reveal how different factors, such as effect size, allele frequency, and interaction, jointly affect the statistical power of each strategy. An example is provided for the application of our approach to empirical research. The statistical approach used in our derivations is general and can be employed to address the model selection problems in other random predictor settings. We have developed an R package markerSearchPower to implement our formulas, which can be downloaded from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) or http://bioinformatics.med.yale.edu/group/.

Project description:BackgroundAlthough high-throughput genotyping arrays have made whole-genome association studies (WGAS) feasible, only a small proportion of SNPs in the human genome are actually surveyed in such studies. In addition, various SNP arrays assay different sets of SNPs, which leads to challenges in comparing results and merging data for meta-analyses. Genome-wide imputation of untyped markers allows us to address these issues in a direct fashion.Methods384 Caucasian American liver donors were genotyped using Illumina 650Y (Ilmn650Y) arrays, from which we also derived genotypes from the Ilmn317K array. On these data, we compared two imputation methods: MACH and BEAGLE. We imputed 2.5 million HapMap Release22 SNPs, and conducted GWAS on approximately 40,000 liver mRNA expression traits (eQTL analysis). In addition, 200 Caucasian American and 200 African American subjects were genotyped using the Affymetrix 500 K array plus a custom 164 K fill-in chip. We then imputed the HapMap SNPs and quantified the accuracy by randomly masking observed SNPs.ResultsMACH and BEAGLE perform similarly with respect to imputation accuracy. The Ilmn650Y results in excellent imputation performance, and it outperforms Affx500K or Ilmn317K sets. For Caucasian Americans, 90% of the HapMap SNPs were imputed at 98% accuracy. As expected, imputation of poorly tagged SNPs (untyped SNPs in weak LD with typed markers) was not as successful. It was more challenging to impute genotypes in the African American population, given (1) shorter LD blocks and (2) admixture with Caucasian populations in this population. To address issue (2), we pooled HapMap CEU and YRI data as an imputation reference set, which greatly improved overall performance. The approximate 40,000 phenotypes scored in these populations provide a path to determine empirically how the power to detect associations is affected by the imputation procedures. That is, at a fixed false discovery rate, the number of cis-eQTL discoveries detected by various methods can be interpreted as their relative statistical power in the GWAS. In this study, we find that imputation offer modest additional power (by 4%) on top of either Ilmn317K or Ilmn650Y, much less than the power gain from Ilmn317K to Ilmn650Y (13%).ConclusionCurrent algorithms can accurately impute genotypes for untyped markers, which enables researchers to pool data between studies conducted using different SNP sets. While genotyping itself results in a small error rate (e.g. 0.5%), imputing genotypes is surprisingly accurate. We found that dense marker sets (e.g. Ilmn650Y) outperform sparser ones (e.g. Ilmn317K) in terms of imputation yield and accuracy. We also noticed it was harder to impute genotypes for African American samples, partially due to population admixture, although using a pooled reference boosts performance. Interestingly, GWAS carried out using imputed genotypes only slightly increased power on top of assayed SNPs. The reason is likely due to adding more markers via imputation only results in modest gain in genetic coverage, but worsens the multiple testing penalties. Furthermore, cis-eQTL mapping using dense SNP set derived from imputation achieves great resolution, and locate associate peak closer to causal variants than conventional approach.

Dataset Information

Statistical power and utility of meta-analysis methods for cross-phenotype genome-wide association studies.

Publications

Statistical power and utility of meta-analysis methods for cross-phenotype genome-wide association studies.

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