Comprehensive Comparative Analysis of Local False Discovery Rate Control Methods

Due to the advance in technology, the type of data is getting more complicated and large-scale. To analyze such complex data, more advanced technique is required. In case of omics data from two different groups, it is interesting to find significant biomarkers between two groups while controlling error rate such as false discovery rate (FDR). Over the last few decades, a lot of methods that control local false discovery rate have been developed, ranging from one-dimensional to k-dimensional FDR procedure. For comparison study, we select three of them, which have unique and significant properties: Efron’s approach, Ploner’s approach, and Kim’s approach in chronological order. The first approach is one-dimensional approach while the other two are two-dimensional ones. Furthermore, we consider two more variants of Ploner’s approach. We compare the performance of those methods on both simulated and real data.

Interpretation of ‘Omics dynamics in a single subject using local estimates of dispersion between two transcriptomes

Calculating Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs) from RNA-sequencing requires replicates to estimate gene-wise variability, infeasible in clinics. By imposing restrictive transcriptome-wide assumptions limiting inferential opportunities of conventional methods (edgeR, NOISeq-sim, DESeq, DEGseq), comparing two conditions without replicates (TCWR) has been proposed, but not evaluated. Under TCWR conditions (e.g., unaffected tissue vs. tumor), differences of transformed expression of the proposed individualized DEG (iDEG) method follow a distribution calculated across a local partition of related transcripts at baseline expression; thereafter the probability of each DEG is estimated by empirical Bayes with local false discovery rate control using a two-group mixture model. In extensive simulation studies of TCWR methods, iDEG and NOISeq are more accurate at 5%<DEGs<20% (precision>90%, recall>75%, false_positive_rate<1%) and 30%<DEGs<40% (precision=recall∼90%), respectively.The proposed iDEG method borrows localized distribution information from the same individual, a strategy that improves accuracy to compare transcriptomes in absence of replicates at low DEGs conditions. http://www.lussiergroup.org/publications/iDEG

SEMI-PARAMETRIC COVARIATE-MODULATED LOCAL FALSE DISCOVERY RATE FOR GENOME-WIDE ASSOCIATION STUDIES

While genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have discovered thousands of risk loci for heritable disorders, so far even very large meta-analyses have recovered only a fraction of the heritability of most complex traits. Recent work utilizing variance components models has demonstrated that a larger fraction of the heritability of complex phenotypes is captured by the additive effects of SNPs than is evident only in loci surpassing genome-wide significance thresholds, typically set at a Bonferroni-inspired p ≤ 5 x 10-8. Procedures that control false discovery rate can be more powerful, yet these are still under-powered to detect the majority of non-null effects from GWAS. The current work proposes a novel Bayesian semi-parametric two-group mixture model and develops a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for a covariate-modulated local false discovery rate (cmfdr). The probability of being non-null depends on a set of covariates via a logistic function, and the non-null distribution is approximated as a linear combination of B-spline densities, where the weight of each B-spline density depends on a multinomial function of the covariates. The proposed methods were motivated by work on a large meta-analysis of schizophrenia GWAS performed by the Psychiatric Genetics Consortium (PGC). We show that the new cmfdr model fits the PGC schizophrenia GWAS test statistics well, performing better than our previously proposed parametric gamma model for estimating the non-null density and substantially improving power over usual fdr. Using loci declared significant at cmfdr ≤ 0.20, we perform follow-up pathway analyses using the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) homo sapiens pathways database. We demonstrate that the increased yield from the cmfdr model results in an improved ability to test for pathways associated with schizophrenia compared to using those SNPs selected according to usual fdr.