Epistasis Blog

From the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Lab at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (www.epistasis.org)

Friday, May 13, 2005

Detecting epistasis using random walks

A new paper by Hanlon and Lorenz in the Journal of Theoretical Biology presents a strategy based on random walks for detecting epistatic effects contributing to a quantitative trait:

Hanlon P, Lorenz A. A computational method to detect epistatic effects contributing to a quantitative trait. J Theor Biol. 2005 Aug 7;235(3):350-64. [PubMed]

Abstract:

We develop a new computational method to detect epistatic effects that contribute to a complex quantitative trait. Rather than looking for epistatic effects that show statistical significance when considered in isolation, we search for a close approximation to the quantitative trait by a sum of epistatic effects. Our search algorithm consists of a sequence of random walks around the space of sums of epistatic effects. An important feature of our approach is that there is learning between random walks, i.e. the control mechanism that chooses steps in our random walks adapts to the experiences of earlier random walks. We test the effectiveness of our algorithms by applying them to synthetic datasets where the phenotype is a sum of epistatic effects plus normally distributed noise. Our test statistic is the rate of success that our methods achieve in identifying the underlying epistatic effects. We report on the effectiveness of our methods as we vary parameters that are intrinsic to the computation (length of random walks and degree of learning) as well as parameters that are extrinsic to the computation (number of markers, number of individuals, noise level, architecture of the epistatic effects).

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home