Epistasis Blog

From the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (www.epistasis.org)

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Gene-Gene Interaction Analysis Using ReliefF and MDR

Here are two conference papers exploring the properties of ReliefF and MDR for detecting gene-gene interactions. These are both a bit difficult to read but there are some useful ideas presented. Both build on our previous work with the ReliefF family of algorithms. I am not sure whether the first one is relevant, however, given our recent work with spatially uniform ReliefF (SURF) that takes all neighbors within a certain distance. For background reading, see our 2010 Bioinformatics paper that reviews this work.

Pengyi Yang, Joshua WK Ho, Yee Hwa Yang, Bing B Zhou. Gene-gene interaction filtering with ensemble of filters. BMC Bioinformatics 2011, 12(Suppl 1):S10 [PDF]

Abstract

Background. Complex diseases are commonly caused by multiple genes and their interactions with each other. Genome-wide association (GWA) studies provide us the opportunity to capture those disease associated genes and gene-gene interactions through panels of SNP markers. However, a proper filtering procedure is critical to reduce the search space prior to the computationally intensive gene-gene interaction identification step. In this study, we show that two commonly used SNP-SNP interaction filtering algorithms, ReliefF and tuned ReliefF (TuRF), are sensitive to the order of the samples in the dataset, giving rise to unstable and suboptimal results. However, we observe that the ‘unstable’ results from multiple runs of these algorithms can provide valuable information about the dataset. We therefore hypothesize that aggregating results from multiple runs of the algorithm may improve the filtering performance.

Results. We propose a simple and effective ensemble approach in which the results from multiple runs of an unstable filter are aggregated based on the general theory of ensemble learning. The ensemble versions of the ReliefF and TuRF algorithms, referred to as ReliefF-E and TuRF-E, are robust to sample order dependency and enable a more informative investigation of data characteristics. Using simulated and real datasets, we demonstrate that both the ensemble of ReliefF and the ensemble of TuRF can generate a much more stable SNP ranking than the original algorithms. Furthermore, the ensemble of TuRF achieved the highest success rate in comparison to many state-of-the-art algorithms as well as traditional χ2-test and odds ratio methods in terms of retaining gene-gene interactions.

Can Yang, Xiang Wan, Zengyou He, Qiang Yang, Hong Xue, Weichuan Yu. The choice of null distributions for detecting gene-gene interactions in genome-wide association studies. BMC Bioinformatics 2011, 12(Suppl 1):S26 [PDF]

Abstract

Background. In genome-wide association studies (GWAS), the number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) typically ranges between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Accordingly, detecting gene-gene interactions in GWAS is computationally challenging because it involves hundreds of billions of SNP pairs. Stage-wise strategies are often used to overcome the computational difficulty. In the first stage, fast screening methods (e.g. Tuning ReliefF) are applied to reduce the whole SNP set to a small subset. In the second stage, sophisticated modeling methods (e.g., multifactor-dimensionality reduction (MDR)) are applied to the subset of SNPs to identify interesting interaction models and the corresponding interaction patterns. In the third stage, the significance of the identified interaction patterns is evaluated by hypothesis testing.

Results. In this paper, we show that this stage-wise strategy could be problematic in controlling the false positive rate if the null distribution is not appropriately chosen. This is because screening and modeling may change the null distribution used in hypothesis testing. In our simulation study, we use some popular screening methods and the popular modeling method MDR as examples to show the effect of the inappropriate choice of null distributions. To choose appropriate null distributions, we suggest to use the permutation test or testing on the independent data set. We demonstrate their performance using synthetic data and a real genome wide data set from an Aged-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) study.

Conclusions. The permutation test or testing on the independent data set can help choosing appropriate null distributions in hypothesis testing, which provides more reliable results in practice.

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