Thursday, November 16, 2017

BISTRO - Wei Zhou

4:00 PM

2036 Palmer Commons

BISTRO is restricted to U-M Bioinformatics Graduate Program students and faculty.

"Efficiently controlling for case-control imbalance and sample relatedness in large-scale genetic association studies"

Abstract

In genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for thousands of phenotypes in large biobanks, most binary traits have substantially fewer cases than controls. Both of the widely used approaches, linear mixed model and the recently proposed logistic mixed model, perform poorly an produce large type I error rates in the analysis of phenotypes with unbalanced case-control ratios. Here we propose a scalable and accurate generalized mixed model association test that uses the saddlepoint approximation (SPA) to calibrate the distribution of score test statistics. This method, SAIGE, provides accurate p-values even when case-control ratios are extremely unbalanced. It utilizes state-of-the-art optimization strategies to reduce computational time and the memory cost of the generalized mixed model. The computational cost linearly depends on sample size, and hence can be applicable to GWAS for thousands of phenotypes by large biobanks. Through the analysis of the UK-Biobank data of 408,961 white British European-ancestry samples, we show that SAIGE can efficiently analyze large sample data and control for unbalanced case-control ratios and sample relatedness.