Epistasis Blog

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

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Survival dimensionality reduction

This is a nice new paper on using MDR for survival analysis. Free software is available. We also have a paper in revision on a survival MDR method. I will post information on our paper when it is accepted.

Beretta L, Santaniello A, Vanriel PL, Coenen MJ, Scorza R. Survival dimensionality reduction (SDR): development and clinical application of an innovative approach to detect epistasis in presence of right-censored data. BMC Bioinformatics. 2010 Aug 6;11(1):416. [PubMed]

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Epistasis is recognized as a fundamental part of the genetic architecture of individuals. Several computational approaches have been developed to model gene-gene interactions in case-control studies, however, none of them is suitable for time-dependent analysis. Herein we introduce the Survival Dimensionality Reduction (SDR) algorithm, a non-parametric method specifically designed to detect epistasis in lifetime datasets. RESULTS: The algorithm requires neither specification about the underlying survival distribution nor about the underlying interaction model and proved satisfactorily powerful to detect a set of causative genes in synthetic epistatic lifetime datasets with a limited number of samples and high degree of right-censorship (up to 70%). The SDR method was then applied to a series of 386 Dutch patients with active rheumatoid arthritis that were treated with anti-TNF biological agents. Among a set of 39 candidate genes, none of which showed a detectable marginal effect on anti-TNF responses, the SDR algorithm did find that the rs1801274 SNP in the FcgammaRIIa gene and the rs10954213 SNP in the IRF5 gene non-linearly interact to predict clinical remission after anti-TNF biologicals. CONCLUSIONS: Simulation studies and application in a real-world setting support the capability of the SDR algorithm to model epistatic interactions in candidate-genes studies in presence of right-censored data. AVAILABILITY: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdrproject/

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