Statistics and Its Interface

Volume 7 (2014)

Number 1

We dedicate this special issue to Dr. Gang Zheng, a great colleague and dear friend to many of us.

Estimation of genetic effects incorporating prior information

Pages: 43 – 50

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/SII.2014.v7.n1.a5

Authors

Ao Yuan (Statistical Genetics and Bioinformatics Unit, National Human Genome Center, Howard University, Washington D.C., U.S.A.)

Qizhai Li (Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China)

Jing Qin (Biostatistics Research Branch, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.)

Gang Zheng (Office of Biostatistics Research, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.)

Abstract

We study estimations of the genetic effect of a marker by adjusting out covariates and incorporating the results of previous potentially heterogenous studies of the same genetic marker. Without prior information on the covariates, the procedures are based on both frequentist and Bayesian methods by simultaneously maximizing the likelihood function for the coefficients of the covariates and minimizing the loss function for the genetic effect, and hence are regarded as hybrid estimations. Although we focus on an application to case-control genetic association studies, we describe a general method for various types of traits. For the application, we show that the proposed hybrid inference based on the prospective sampling can be applied to retrospectively collected case-control data. Simulations and applications using hybrid inference are presented.

Keywords

asymptotics, Bayesian analysis, case-control genetic study, hybrid inference, loss function, power prior, prospective and retrospective

2010 Mathematics Subject Classification

62F12, 62F15, 62P10

Full Text (PDF format)

Published 8 April 2014