B0211
Title: HIMA2: High dimensional mediation analysis and its application to epigenome-wide DNA methylation data
Authors: Lei Liu - Washington University in St. Louis (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: Mediation analysis plays a major role in identifying significant mediators in the pathway between environmental exposures and health outcomes. With advanced data collection technology for large-scale studies, there has been growing research interest in developing a methodology for high-dimensional mediation analysis. We present HIMA2, an extension of the HIMA method. First, the proposed HIMA2 reduces the dimension of mediators to a manageable level based on the sure independence screening (SIS) method. Second, a de-biased Lasso procedure is implemented for estimating regression parameters. Third, we use a multiple-testing procedure to accurately control the false discovery rate (FDR) when testing high-dimensional mediation hypotheses. We demonstrate its practical performance using Monte Carlo simulation studies and apply our method to identify DNA methylation markers which mediate the pathway from smoking to reduced lung function in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study.