Estimating the posterior probability that genome-wide association findings are true or false.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

A limitation of current methods used to declare significance in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is that they do not provide clear information about the probability that GWAS findings are true of false. This lack of information increases the chance of false discoveries and may result in real effects being missed.

Results

We propose a method to estimate the posterior probability that a marker has (no) effect given its test statistic value, also called the local false discovery rate (FDR), in the GWAS. A critical step involves the estimation the parameters of the distribution of the true alternative tests. For this, we derived and implemented the real maximum likelihood function, which turned out to provide us with significantly more accurate estimates than th

SUBMITTER: Bukszar J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2705227 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature