Logistic Regression or MDR? Both!

Which is better for detecting epistasis: logistic regression or MDR? An excellent new paper by Millstein et al. in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests that logistic regression may have more power for detecting epistasis when main effects are present. This is not too surprising. Our multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) approach was designed specifically to improve the power to detect epistasis in the absence of detectable main effects. Thus, MDR complements a traditional logistic regression analysis. My experience with real data is that MDR confirms anything found by logistic regression and is able to identify interesting interactions that logistic regression misses. Our new paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology shows how MDR and logistic regression can be used together in a flexible computational framework.

See:

Millstein J, Conti DV, Gilliland FD, Gauderman WJ. A testing framework for identifying susceptibility genes in the presence of epistasis. Am J Hum Genet. 2006 Jan;78(1):15-27. [PubMed]

Moore JH, Gilbert JC, Tsai CT, Chiang FT, Holden T, Barney N, White BC. A flexible computational framework for detecting, characterizing, and interpreting statistical patterns of epistasis in genetic studies of human disease susceptibility. J Theor Biol. 2006 Jan 31; [PubMed]