A method combining a random forest-based technique with the modeling of linkage disequilibrium through latent variables, to run multilocus genome-wide association studies

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been widely used to discover the genetic basis of complex phenotypes. However, standard single-SNP GWASs suffer from lack of power. In particular, they do not directly account for linkage disequilibrium, that is the dependences between SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).

Results: We present the comparative study of two multilocus GWAS strategies, in the random forest-based framework. The first method, T-Trees, was designed by Botta and collaborators (Botta et al., PLoS ONE 9(4):e93379, 2014). We designed the other method, which is an innovative hybrid method combining T-Trees with the modeling of linkage disequilibrium. Linkage disequilibrium is modeled through a collection of tree-shaped Bayesian networks with latent variables, following our former works (Mourad et al., BMC Bioinformatics 12(1):16, 2011). We compared the two methods, both on simulated and real data. For dominant and additive genetic models, in either of the conditions simulated, the hybrid approach always slightly performs better than T-Trees. We assessed predictive powers through the standard ROC technique on 14 real datasets. For 10 of the 14 datasets analyzed, the already high predicted power observed for T-Trees (0.910-0.946) can still be increased by up to 0.030. We also assessed whether the distributions of SNPs' scores obtained from T-Trees and the hybrid approach differed. Finally, we thoroughly analyzed the intersections of top 100 SNPs output by any two or the three methods amongst T-Trees, the hybrid approach, and the single-SNP method.

Conclusions: The sophistication of T-Trees through finer linkage disequilibrium modeling is shown beneficial. The distributions of SNPs' scores generated by T-Trees and the hybrid approach are shown statistically different, which suggests complementary of the methods. In particular, for 12 of the 14 real datasets, the distribution tail of highest SNPs' scores shows larger values for the hybrid approach. Thus are pinpointed more interesting SNPs than by T-Trees, to be provided as a short list of prioritized SNPs, for a further analysis by biologists. Finally, among the 211 top 100 SNPs jointly detected by the single-SNP method, T-Trees and the hybrid approach over the 14 datasets, we identified 72 and 38 SNPs respectively present in the top25s and top10s for each method.