Novel genetic matching methods for handling population stratification in genome-wide association studies.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A usually confronted problem in association studies is the occurrence of population stratification. In this work, we propose a novel framework to consider population matchings in the contexts of genome-wide and sequencing association studies. We employ pairwise and groupwise optimal case-control matchings and present an agglomerative hierarchical clustering, both based on a genetic similarity score matrix. In order to ensure that the resulting matches obtained from the matching algorithm capture correctly the population structure, we propose and discuss two stratum validation methods. We also invent a decisive extension to the Cochran-Armitage Trend test to explicitly take into account the particular population structure.

Results

We assess our framework by simulat

SUBMITTER: Lacour A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4367953 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature