B0992
Title: BGWAS: Bayesian variable selection in linear mixed models with nonlocal priors for genome-wide association studies
Authors: Jacob Williams - Virginia Tech (United States) [presenting]
Shuangshuang Xu - Virginia Tech (United States)
Marco Ferreira - Virginia Tech (United States)
Abstract: We propose BGWAS, a novel Bayesian variable selection method based on nonlocal priors for linear mixed models specifically tailored for genome-wide association studies. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) seek to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that cause observed phenotypes. However, with highly correlated SNPs, correlated observations, and the number of SNPs being two orders of magnitude larger than the number of observations, GWAS procedures often suffer from high false positive rates. To correct for this, our proposed method BGWAS uses a novel nonlocal prior for linear mixed models (LMMs). BGWAS has two steps: screening and model selection. The screening step scans through all the SNPs fitting one LMM for each SNP and then uses Bayesian false discovery control to select a set of candidate SNPs. After that, a model selection step searches through the space of LMMs that may have any number of SNPs from the candidate set. A simulation study shows that, when compared to popular GWAS procedures, BGWAS greatly reduces false positives while maintaining the same ability to detect true positive SNPs. We show the utility and flexibility of BGWAS with two case studies: a case study on salt stress in plants, and a case study on alcohol use disorder.
