Bayesian Partition Models for Identifying Expression Quantitative Trait Loci

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jiang, Bo; Liu, Jun S.
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2015.1049746
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1350-1361
• 关键词: integrative genomics approach; gene-expression; Linkage analysis; networks; complexity

摘要

Expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) are genomic locations associated with changes of expression levels of certain genes. By assaying gene expressions and genetic variations simultaneously on a genome-wide scale, scientists wish to discover genomic loci responsible for expression variations of a set of genes. The task can be viewed as a multivariate regression problem with variable selection on both responses (gene expression) and covariates (genetic variations), including alsomulti-way interactions among covariates. Instead of learning a predictive model of quantitative trait given combinations of genetic markers, we adopt an inverse modeling perspective to model the distribution of genetic markers conditional on gene expression traits. A particular strength of our method is its ability to detect interactive effects of genetic variations with high power even when their marginal effects are weak, addressing a key weakness of many existing eQTL mapping methods. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical model to capture the dependence structure among correlated genes. Through simulation studies and a real data example in yeast, we demonstrate how our Bayesian hierarchical partition model achieves a significantly improved power in detecting eQTLs compared to existing methods. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.