Retrospective Binary-Trait Association Test Elucidates Genetic Architecture of Crohn Disease.

ABSTRACT: In genetic association testing, failure to properly control for population structure can lead to severely inflated type 1 error and power loss. Meanwhile, adjustment for relevant covariates is often desirable and sometimes necessary to protect against spurious association and to improve power. Many recent methods to account for population structure and covariates are based on linear mixed models (LMMs), which are primarily designed for quantitative traits. For binary traits, however, LMM is a misspecified model and can lead to deteriorated performance. We propose CARAT, a binary-trait association testing approach based on a mixed-effects quasi-likelihood framework, which exploits the dichotomous nature of the trait and achieves computational efficiency through estimating equations. We show

SUBMITTER: Jiang D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4746383 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature