Abstracts Category : Other

Bayesian lasso| An extension for genome-wide association study

by LiJin Joo

In genome-wide association study (GWAS), variable selection has been used for prioritizing candidate single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Relating densely located SNPs to a complex trait, we need a method that is robust under various genetic architectures, yet is sensitive enough to detect the marginal difference between null and non-null factors. For this problem, ordinary Lasso produced too many false positives, and Bayesian Lasso by Gibbs samplers became too conservative when selection criterion was posterior credible sets. My proposals to improve Bayesian Lasso include two aspects: To use stochastic approximation, variational Bayes for increasing computational efficiency and to use a Dirichlet-Laplace prior for separating small effects from nulls better. Both a double exponential prior of Bayesian Lasso and a Dirichlet-Laplace prior have a global-local mixture representation, and variational Bayes can effectively handle the hierarchies of a model due to the mixture representation. In the analysis of simulated and real sequencing data, the proposed methods showed meaningful improvements on both efficiency and accuracy.