scholarly journals RAISS: Robust and Accurate imputation from Summary Statistics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Julienne ◽  
Huwenbo Shi ◽  
Bogdan Pasaniuc ◽  
Hugues Aschard

AbstractMotivationMulti-trait analyses using public summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are becoming increasingly popular. A constraint of multi-trait methods is that they require complete summary data for all traits. While methods for the imputation of summary statistics exist, they lack precision for genetic variants with small effect size. This is benign for univariate analyses where only variants with large effect size are selected a posteriori. However, it can lead to strong p-value inflation in multi-trait testing. Here we present a new approach that improve the existing imputation methods and reach a precision suitable for multi-trait analyses.ResultsWe fine-tuned parameters to obtain a very high accuracy imputation from summary statistics. We demonstrate this accuracy for small size-effect variants on real data of 28 GWAS. We implemented the resulting methodology in a python package specially designed to efficiently impute multiple GWAS in parallel.AvailabilityThe python package is available at: https://gitlab.pasteur.fr/statistical-genetics/raiss, its accompanying documentation is accessible here http://statistical-genetics.pages.pasteur.fr/raiss/[email protected]

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (22) ◽  
pp. 4837-4839 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Julienne ◽  
Huwenbo Shi ◽  
Bogdan Pasaniuc ◽  
Hugues Aschard

Abstract Motivation Multi-trait analyses using public summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are becoming increasingly popular. A constraint of multi-trait methods is that they require complete summary data for all traits. Although methods for the imputation of summary statistics exist, they lack precision for genetic variants with small effect size. This is benign for univariate analyses where only variants with large effect size are selected a posteriori. However, it can lead to strong p-value inflation in multi-trait testing. Here we present a new approach that improve the existing imputation methods and reach a precision suitable for multi-trait analyses. Results We fine-tuned parameters to obtain a very high accuracy imputation from summary statistics. We demonstrate this accuracy for variants of all effect sizes on real data of 28 GWAS. We implemented the resulting methodology in a python package specially designed to efficiently impute multiple GWAS in parallel. Availability and implementation The python package is available at: https://gitlab.pasteur.fr/statistical-genetics/raiss, its accompanying documentation is accessible here http://statistical-genetics.pages.pasteur.fr/raiss/. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


Author(s):  
Jack W. O’Sullivan ◽  
John P. A. Ioannidis

AbstractWith the establishment of large biobanks, discovery of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) that are associated with various phenotypes has been accelerated. An open question is whether SNPs identified with genome-wide significance in earlier genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are replicated also in later GWAS conducted in biobanks. To address this question, the authors examined a publicly available GWAS database and identified two, independent GWAS on the same phenotype (an earlier, “discovery” GWAS and a later, replication GWAS done in the UK biobank). The analysis evaluated 136,318,924 SNPs (of which 6,289 had reached p<5e-8 in the discovery GWAS) from 4,397,962 participants across nine phenotypes. The overall replication rate was 85.0% and it was lower for binary than for quantitative phenotypes (58.1% versus 94.8% respectively). There was a18.0% decrease in SNP effect size for binary phenotypes, but a 12.0% increase for quantitative phenotypes. Using the discovery SNP effect size, phenotype trait (binary or quantitative), and discovery p-value, we built and validated a model that predicted SNP replication with area under the Receiver Operator Curve = 0.90. While non-replication may often reflect lack of power rather than genuine false-positive findings, these results provide insights about which discovered associations are likely to be seen again across subsequent GWAS.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zijie Zhao ◽  
Yanyao Yi ◽  
Yuchang Wu ◽  
Xiaoyuan Zhong ◽  
Yupei Lin ◽  
...  

AbstractPolygenic risk scores (PRSs) have wide applications in human genetics research. Notably, most PRS models include tuning parameters which improve predictive performance when properly selected. However, existing model-tuning methods require individual-level genetic data as the training dataset or as a validation dataset independent from both training and testing samples. These data rarely exist in practice, creating a significant gap between PRS methodology and applications. Here, we introduce PUMAS (Parameter-tuning Using Marginal Association Statistics), a novel method to fine-tune PRS models using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Through extensive simulations, external validations, and analysis of 65 traits, we demonstrate that PUMAS can perform a variety of model-tuning procedures (e.g. cross-validation) using GWAS summary statistics and can effectively benchmark and optimize PRS models under diverse genetic architecture. On average, PUMAS improves the predictive R2 by 205.6% and 62.5% compared to PRSs with arbitrary p-value cutoffs of 0.01 and 1, respectively. Applied to 211 neuroimaging traits and Alzheimer’s disease, we show that fine-tuned PRSs will significantly improve statistical power in downstream association analysis. We believe our method resolves a fundamental problem without a current solution and will greatly benefit genetic prediction applications.


Author(s):  
Yiliang Zhang ◽  
Youshu Cheng ◽  
Wei Jiang ◽  
Yixuan Ye ◽  
Qiongshi Lu ◽  
...  

AbstractGenetic correlation is the correlation of additive genetic effects on two phenotypes. It is an informative metric to quantify the overall genetic similarity between complex traits, which provides insights into their polygenic genetic architecture. Several methods have been proposed to estimate genetic correlations based on data collected from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Due to the easy access of GWAS summary statistics and computational efficiency, methods only requiring GWAS summary statistics as input have become more popular than methods utilizing individual-level genotype data. Here, we present a benchmark study for different summary-statistics-based genetic correlation estimation methods through simulation and real data applications. We focus on two major technical challenges in estimating genetic correlation: marker dependency caused by linkage disequilibrium (LD) and sample overlap between different studies. To assess the performance of different methods in the presence of these two challenges, we first conducted comprehensive simulations with diverse LD patterns and sample overlaps. Then we applied these methods to real GWAS summary statistics for a wide spectrum of complex traits. Based on these experiments, we conclude that methods relying on accurate LD estimation are less robust in real data applications compared to other methods due to the imprecision of LD obtained from reference panels. Our findings offer a guidance on how to appropriately choose the method for genetic correlation estimation in post-GWAS analysis in interpretation.


Author(s):  
Lars G. Fritsche ◽  
Snehal Patil ◽  
Lauren J. Beesley ◽  
Peter VandeHaar ◽  
Maxwell Salvatore ◽  
...  

AbstractTo facilitate scientific collaboration on polygenic risk scores (PRS) research, we created an extensive PRS online repository for 49 common cancer traits integrating freely available genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary statistics from three sources: published GWAS, the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog, and UK Biobank-based GWAS. Our framework condenses these summary statistics into PRS using various approaches such as linkage disequilibrium pruning / p-value thresholding (fixed or data-adaptively optimized thresholds) and penalized, genome-wide effect size weighting. We evaluated the PRS in two biobanks: the Michigan Genomics Initiative (MGI), a longitudinal biorepository effort at Michigan Medicine, and the population-based UK Biobank (UKB). For each PRS construct, we provide measures on predictive performance, calibration, and discrimination. Besides PRS evaluation, the Cancer-PRSweb platform features construct downloads and phenome-wide PRS association study results (PRS-PheWAS) for predictive PRS. We expect this integrated platform to accelerate PRS-related cancer research.


Author(s):  
Xiaofeng Zhu ◽  
Xiaoyin Li ◽  
Rong Xu ◽  
Tao Wang

Abstract Motivation The overall association evidence of a genetic variant with multiple traits can be evaluated by cross-phenotype association analysis using summary statistics from genome-wide association studies. Further dissecting the association pathways from a variant to multiple traits is important to understand the biological causal relationships among complex traits. Results Here, we introduce a flexible and computationally efficient Iterative Mendelian Randomization and Pleiotropy (IMRP) approach to simultaneously search for horizontal pleiotropic variants and estimate causal effect. Extensive simulations and real data applications suggest that IMRP has similar or better performance than existing Mendelian Randomization methods for both causal effect estimation and pleiotropic variant detection. The developed pleiotropy test is further extended to detect colocalization for multiple variants at a locus. IMRP will greatly facilitate our understanding of causal relationships underlying complex traits, in particular, when a large number of genetic instrumental variables are used for evaluating multiple traits. Availability and implementation The software IMRP is available at https://github.com/XiaofengZhuCase/IMRP. The simulation codes can be downloaded at http://hal.case.edu/∼xxz10/zhu-web/ under the link: MR Simulations software. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alba Refoyo-Martínez ◽  
Siyang Liu ◽  
Anja Moltke Jørgensen ◽  
Xin Jin ◽  
Anders Albrechtsen ◽  
...  

AbstractOver the past decade, summary statistics from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been used to detect and quantify polygenic adaptation in humans. Several studies have reported signatures of natural selection at sets of SNPs associated with complex traits, like height and body mass index. However, more recent studies suggest that some of these signals may be caused by biases from uncorrected population stratification in the GWAS data with which these tests are performed. Moreover, past studies have predominantly relied on SNP effect size estimates obtained from GWAS panels of European ancestries, which are known to be poor predictors of phenotypes in non-European populations. Here, we collated GWAS data from multiple anthropometric and metabolic traits that have been measured in more than one cohort around the world, including the UK Biobank, FINRISK, Chinese NIPT, Biobank Japan, APCDR and PAGE. We then evaluated how robust signals of polygenic adaptation are to the choice of GWAS cohort used to identify associated variants and their effect size estimates, while using the same panel to obtain population allele frequencies (The 1000 Genomes Project). We observe many discrepancies across tests performed on the same phenotype and find that association studies performed using multiple different cohorts, like meta-analyses, tend to produce scores with strong overdispersion across populations. This results in apparent signatures of polygenic adaptation which are not observed when using effect size estimates from biobank-based GWAS of homogeneous ancestries. Indeed, we were able to artificially create score overdispersion when taking the UK Biobank cohort and simulating a meta-analysis on multiple subsets of the cohort. This suggests that extreme caution should be taken in the execution and interpretation of future tests of polygenic adaptation based on population differentiation, especially when using summary statistics from GWAS meta-analyses.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Chuan Chang ◽  
June-Tai Wu ◽  
Ming-Yi Hong ◽  
Yi-An Tung ◽  
Ping-Han Hsieh ◽  
...  

AbstractGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) provide a powerful means to identify associations between genetic variants and phenotypes. However, GWAS techniques for detecting epistasis, the interactions between genetic variants associated with phenotypes, are still limited. We believe that developing an efficient and effective GWAS method to detect epistasis will be a key for discovering sophisticated pathogenesis, which is especially important for complex diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this regard, this study presents GenEpi, a computational package to uncover epistasis associated with phenotypes by the proposed machine learning approach. GenEpi identifies both within-gene and cross-gene epistasis through a two-stage modeling workflow. In both stages, GenEpi adopts two-element combinatorial encoding when producing features and constructs the prediction models by L1-regularized regression with stability selection. The simulated data showed that GenEpi outperforms other widely-used methods on detecting ground-truth epistasis. As real data is concerned, this study uses AD as an example to reveal the capability of GenEpi in finding disease-related variants and variant interactions that show both biological meanings and predictive power. Availability: GenEpi is an open-source python package and available free of charge only for non-commercial users. The package can be downloaded from https://github.com/Chester75321/GenEpi, and has also been published on The Python Package Index.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack W. O’Sullivan ◽  
John P . A. Ioannidis

Abstract With the establishment of large biobanks, discovery of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) associated with various phenotypes has accelerated. An open question is whether genome-wide significant SNPs identified in earlier genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are replicated in later GWAS conducted in biobanks. To address this, we examined a publicly available GWAS database and identified two, independent GWAS on the same phenotype (an earlier, “discovery” GWAS and a later, “replication” GWAS done in UK biobank). The analysis evaluated 136,318,924 SNPs (of which 6,289 reached p<5e-8 in the discovery GWAS) from 4,397,962 participants across nine phenotypes. The overall replication rate was 85.0%; although lower for binary than quantitative phenotypes (58.1% versus 94.8% respectively). There was a 18.0% decrease in SNP effect size for binary phenotypes, but a 12.0% increase for quantitative phenotypes. Using the discovery SNP effect size, phenotype trait (binary or quantitative), and discovery p-value, we built and validated a model that predicted SNP replication with area under the Receiver Operator Curve = 0.90. While non-replication may reflect lack of power rather than genuine false-positives, these results provide insights about which discovered associations are likely to be replicated across subsequent GWAS.


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