Bump hunting to identify differentially methylated regions in epigenetic epidemiology studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

During the past 5 years, high-throughput technologies have been successfully used by epidemiology studies, but almost all have focused on sequence variation through genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Today, the study of other genomic events is becoming more common in large-scale epidemiological studies. Many of these, unlike the single-nucleotide polymorphism studied in GWAS, are continuous measures. In this context, the exercise of searching for regions of interest for disease is akin to the problems described in the statistical 'bump hunting' literature.

Methods

New statistical challenges arise when the measurements are continuous rather than categorical, when they are measured with uncertainty, and when both biological signal, and measurement errors are ch

SUBMITTER: Jaffe AE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3304533 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature