A Robust Test for Additive Gene-Environment Interaction Under the Trend Effect of Genotype Using an Empirical Bayes-Type Shrinkage Estimator.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Sanyal N
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8579053 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:MOTIVATION:Genomic studies often involve estimation of variances of thousands of genes (or other genomic units) from just a few measurements on each. For example, variance estimation is an important step in gene expression analyses aimed at identifying differentially expressed genes. A common approach to this problem is to use an Empirical Bayes (EB) method that assumes the variances among genes follow an inverse-gamma distribution. This distributional assumption is relatively inflexible; for example, it may not capture 'outlying' genes whose variances are considerably bigger than usual. Here we describe a more flexible EB method, capable of capturing a much wider range of distributions. Indeed, the main assumption is that the distribution of the variances is unimodal (or, as an alternative, that the distribution of the precisions is unimodal). We argue that the unimodal assumption provides an attractive compromise between flexibility, computational tractability and statistical efficiency. RESULTS:We show that this more flexible approach provides competitive performance with existing methods when the variances truly come from an inverse-gamma distribution, and can outperform them when the distribution of the variances is more complex. In analyses of several human gene expression datasets from the Genotype Tissues Expression consortium, we find that our more flexible model often fits the data appreciably better than the single inverse gamma distribution. At the same time we find that in these data this improved model fit leads to only small improvements in variance estimates and detection of differentially expressed genes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION:Our methods are implemented in an R package vashr available from http://github.com/mengyin/vashr CONTACT: mstephens@uchicago.eduSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
| S-EPMC5181563 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThe post-genomic era with its wealth of sequences gave rise to a broad range of protein residue-residue contact detecting methods. Although various coevolution methods such as PSICOV, DCA and plmDCA provide correct contact predictions, they do not completely overlap. Hence, new approaches and improvements of existing methods are needed to motivate further development and progress in the field. We present a new contact detecting method, COUSCOus, by combining the best shrinkage approach, the empirical Bayes covariance estimator and GLasso.ResultsUsing the original PSICOV benchmark dataset, COUSCOus achieves mean accuracies of 0.74, 0.62 and 0.55 for the top L/10 predicted long, medium and short range contacts, respectively. In addition, COUSCOus attains mean areas under the precision-recall curves of 0.25, 0.29 and 0.30 for long, medium and short contacts and outperforms PSICOV. We also observed that COUSCOus outperforms PSICOV w.r.t. Matthew's correlation coefficient criterion on full list of residue contacts. Furthermore, COUSCOus achieves on average 10% more gain in prediction accuracy compared to PSICOV on an independent test set composed of CASP11 protein targets. Finally, we showed that when using a simple random forest meta-classifier, by combining contact detecting techniques and sequence derived features, PSICOV predictions should be replaced by the more accurate COUSCOus predictions.ConclusionWe conclude that the consideration of superior covariance shrinkage approaches will boost several research fields that apply the GLasso procedure, amongst the presented one of residue-residue contact prediction as well as fields such as gene network reconstruction.
| S-EPMC5159955 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We combine two important ideas in the analysis of large-scale genomics experiments (e.g. experiments that aim to identify genes that are differentially expressed between two conditions). The first is use of Empirical Bayes (EB) methods to handle the large number of potentially-sparse effects, and estimate false discovery rates and related quantities. The second is use of factor analysis methods to deal with sources of unwanted variation such as batch effects and unmeasured confounders. We describe a simple modular fitting procedure that combines key ideas from both these lines of research. This yields new, powerful EB methods for analyzing genomics experiments that account for both sparse effects and unwanted variation. In realistic simulations, these new methods provide significant gains in power and calibration over competing methods. In real data analysis, we find that different methods, while often conceptually similar, can vary widely in their assessments of statistical significance. This highlights the need for care in both choice of methods and interpretation of results.
| S-EPMC8204175 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Simultaneous testing of multiple genetic variants for association is widely recognized as a valuable complementary approach to single-marker tests. As such, principal component regression (PCR) has been found to have competitive power. We focus on exploring a robust test for an unknown genetic mode of all SNPs, an unknown Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) in a population, and a large number of all SNPs. First, we propose a new global test by means of the use of codominant codes for all markers and PCR. The new global test is built on an empirical Bayes-type score statistic for testing marginal associations with each single marker. The new global test gains power by robustly exploiting the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium in the control population and effectively using linkage disequilibrium among test markers. The new global test reduces to PCR when the genotype for each marker is coded as the number of minor alleles. This connection lends insight into the power of the new global test relative to PCR and some other popular multimarker test methods. Second, we propose a robust test method based on the new global test and the ordinary PCR test built on a prospective score statistic for testing marginal associations with each single marker when the genotype for each marker is coded as the number of minor alleles by taking the minimum p value of these two tests. Finally, through extensive simulation studies and analysis of the association between pancreatic cancer and some genes of interest, we show that the proposed robust test method has desirable power and can often identify association signals that may be missed by existing methods.
| S-EPMC7229558 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The graphon (W-graph), including the stochastic block model as a special case, has been widely used in modeling and analyzing network data. Estimation of the graphon function has gained a lot of recent research interests. Most existing works focus on inference in the latent space of the model, while adopting simple maximum likelihood or Bayesian estimates for the graphon or connectivity parameters given the identified latent variables. In this work, we propose a hierarchical model and develop a novel empirical Bayes estimate of the connectivity matrix of a stochastic block model to approximate the graphon function. Based on our hierarchical model, we further introduce a new model selection criterion for choosing the number of communities. Numerical results on extensive simulations and two well-annotated social networks demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of parameter estimation and model selection.
| S-EPMC9299287 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by high-throughput sequencing (ChIP-seq) has enabled discovery of genomic regions enriched with biological signals such as transcription factor binding and histone modifications. Allelic-imbalance (ALI) detection is a complementary analysis of ChIP-seq data for associating biological signals with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). It has been successfully used in elucidating functional roles of non-coding SNPs. Commonly used statistical approaches for ALI detection are often based on binomial testing and mixture models, both of which rely on strong assumptions on the distribution of the unobserved allelic probability, and have significant practical shortcomings. We propose Non-Parametric Binomial (NPBin) test for ALI detection and for modeling Binomial data in general. NPBin models the density of the unobserved allelic probability non-parametrically, and estimates its empirical null distribution via curve fitting. We demonstrate the advantages of NPBin in terms of interpretability of the estimated density and the accuracy in ALI detection using simulations and analysis of several ChIP-seq data sets. We also illustrate the generality of our modeling framework beyond ALI detection by an application to a baseball batting average prediction problem. This article has supplementary material available at Biostatistics online. The code and the sample input data have been also deposited to github https://github.com/QiZhangStat/ALIdetection.
| S-EPMC6454553 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Air pollution is a matter of concern among the public, especially for those living in urban and industrial areas. Markov chain modeling is often used to model the underlying dynamics of air pollution, which involves describing the transition probability of going from one air pollution state to another. Thus, estimating the transition probability matrix for the data of the air pollution index (API) is an essential process in the modeling. However, one may observe many zero probabilities in the transition probability matrix, especially when faced with a small sample, interpreting the results with respect to the climate condition less realistic. This study proposes a robust empirical Bayes method, which incorporates a method of smoothing the zero frequencies in the count matrix, contributing to an improved estimation of the transition probability matrix. The robustness of the empirical Bayesian estimation is investigated based on Bayes risk. The transition probability matrices estimated based on the robust empirical Bayes method for the hourly API data collected from seven monitoring stations in Malaysia for the period 2012 to 2014 are used for determining the air pollution characteristics such as the mean residence time, the steady-state probability and the mean recurrence time. Furthermore, the proposed method has been evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations. Results suggest that it is quite effective in producing non-zero transition probability estimates, and superior to the maximum likelihood method in terms of minimizing the mean squared error for individual and entire transition probabilities. Therefore, the robust empirical Bayes method proves to be an improved approach to the estimation of the Markov chain. When applied to API data, it could provide important information on air pollution dynamics that may help guiding the development of proper strategies for managing the impact of air quality.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40201-020-00607-4.
| S-EPMC8172767 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Motivation: Computational inference methods that make use of graphical models to extract regulatory networks from gene expression data can have difficulty reconstructing dense regions of a network, a consequence of both computational complexity and unreliable parameter estimation when sample size is small. As a result, identification of hub genes is of special difficulty for these methods.Methods: We present a new algorithm, Empirical Light Mutual Min (ELMM), for large network reconstruction that has properties well suited for dense graph recovery. ELMM reconstructs the undirected graph of a regulatory network using empirical Bayes conditional independence testing with a heuristic relaxation of independence constraints in dense areas of the graph. This relaxation allows only one gene of a pair with a putative relation to be aware of the network connection, an approach that is aimed at easing multiple testing problems associated with recovering densely connected structures.Results: Using in silico data, we show that ELMM has better performance than commonly used network inference algorithms including PC Algorithm, GeneNet, and ARACNE. We also apply ELMM to reconstruct a network among 5,400 genes expressed in human lung airway epithelium of healthy nonsmokers, healthy smokers, and smokers with pulmonary diseases assayed using microarrays. The analysis identifies dense subnetworks that are consistent with known regulatory relationships in the lung airway and also suggests novel hub regulatory relationships among a number of genes that play roles in oxidative stress, wound response, and secretion.
2024-06-05 | GSE32030 | GEO
Project description:Many methods used in multi-locus genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been developed to improve statistical power. However, most existing multi-locus methods are not quicker than single-locus methods. To address this concern, we proposed a fast score test integrated with Empirical Bayes (ScoreEB) for multi-locus GWAS. Firstly, a score test was conducted for each single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) under a linear mixed model (LMM) framework, taking into account the genetic relatedness and population structure. Then, all of the potentially associated SNPs were selected with a less stringent criterion. Finally, Empirical Bayes in a multi-locus model was performed for all of the selected SNPs to identify the true quantitative trait nucleotide (QTN). Our new method ScoreEB adopts the similar strategy of multi-locus random-SNP-effect mixed linear model (mrMLM) and fast multi-locus random-SNP-effect EMMA (FASTmrEMMA), and the only difference is that we use the score test to select all the potentially associated markers. Monte Carlo simulation studies demonstrate that ScoreEB significantly improved the computational efficiency compared with the popular methods mrMLM, FASTmrEMMA, iterative modified-sure independence screening EM-Bayesian lasso (ISIS EM-BLASSO), hybrid of restricted and penalized maximum likelihood (HRePML) and genome-wide efficient mixed model association (GEMMA). In addition, ScoreEB remained accurate in QTN effect estimation and effectively controlled false positive rate. Subsequently, ScoreEB was applied to re-analyze quantitative traits in plants and animals. The results show that ScoreEB not only can detect previously reported genes, but also can mine new genes.
| S-EPMC8517403 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We compared the powers of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) and the Pearson correlation test (CT) from empirical Bayes estimates (EBEs) for various designs and shrinkages in the context of nonlinear mixed-effect modeling. Clinical trial simulation was performed with a simple pharmacokinetic model with various weight (WT) effects on volume (V). Data sets were analyzed with NONMEM 7.2 using first-order conditional estimation with interaction and stochastic approximation expectation maximization algorithms. The powers of LRT and CT in detecting the link between individual WT and V or clearance were computed to explore hidden or induced correlations, respectively. Although the different designs and variabilities could be related to the large shrinkage of the EBEs, type 1 errors and powers were similar in LRT and CT in all cases. Power was mostly influenced by covariate effect size and, to a lesser extent, by the informativeness of the design. Further studies with more models are needed.
| S-EPMC4011164 | biostudies-literature