The Patient Rule-Induction Method

This is a very interesting paper by Dyson et al. in Genetic Epidemiology that looks at genetic epi data in a different way. It is worth checking out.

Dyson G, Frikke-Schmidt R, Nordestgaard BG, Tybjaerg-Hansen A, Sing CF. An application of the patient rule-induction method for evaluating the contribution of the Apolipoprotein E and Lipoprotein Lipase genes to predicting ischemic heart disease. Genet Epidemiol. 2007 Sep;31(6):515-27. [PubMed]

Different combinations of genetic and environmental risk factors are known to contribute to the complex etiology of ischemic heart disease (IHD) in different subsets of individuals. We employed the Patient Rule-Induction Method (PRIM) to select the combination of risk factors and risk factor values that identified each of 16 mutually exclusive partitions of individuals having significantly different levels of risk of IHD. PRIM balances two competing objectives: (1) finding partitions where the risk of IHD is high and (2) maximizing the number of IHD cases explained by the partitions. A sequential PRIM analysis was applied to data on the incidence of IHD collected over 8 years for a sample of 5,455 unrelated individuals from the Copenhagen City Heart Study (CCHS) to assess the added value of variation in two candidate susceptibility genes beyond the traditional, lipid and body mass index risk factors for IHD. An independent sample of 362 unrelated individuals also from the city of Copenhagen was used to test the model obtained for each of the hypothesized partitions.