Knowledge on the relationship between different biological modalities (RNA, chromatin, etc.) can help further our understanding of the processes through which biological components interact. The ready availability of multi-omics datasets has led to the development of numerous methods for identifying sources of common variation across biological modalities. However, evaluation of the performance of these methods, in terms of consistency, has been difficult because most methods are unsupervised. We present a comparison of sparse multiple canonical correlation analysis (Sparse mCCA), angle-based joint and individual variation explained (AJIVE) and multi-omics factor analysis (MOFA) using a cross-validation approach to assess overfitting and consistency. Both large and small-sample datasets were used to evaluate performance, and a permuted null dataset was used to identify overfitting through the application of our framework and approach. In the large-sample setting, we found that all methods demonstrated consistency and lack of overfitting; however, in the small-sample size setting, AJIVE provided the most stable results. We provide an R package so that our framework and approach can be applied to evaluate other methods and datasets.

SUMMARY: MASS is a command-line program to perform meta-analysis of sequencing studies by combining the score statistics from multiple studies. It implements three types of multivariate tests that encompass all commonly used association tests for rare variants. The input files can be generated from the accompanying software SCORE-Seq. This bundle of programs allows analysis of large sequencing studies in a time and memory efficient manner. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MASS and SCORE-Seq, including documentations and executables, are available at http://dlin.web.unc.edu/software/. CONTACT: [email protected].

MOTIVATION: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) involving half a million or more single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) allow genetic dissection of complex diseases in a holistic manner. The common practice of analyzing one SNP at a time does not fully realize the potential of GWAS to identify multiple causal variants and to predict risk of disease. Existing methods for joint analysis of GWAS data tend to miss causal SNPs that are marginally uncorrelated with disease and have high false discovery rates (FDRs). RESULTS: We introduce GWASelect, a statistically powerful and computationally efficient variable selection method designed to tackle the unique challenges of GWAS data. This method searches iteratively over the potential SNPs conditional on previously selected SNPs and is thus capable of capturing causal SNPs that are marginally correlated with disease as well as those that are marginally uncorrelated with disease. A special resampling mechanism is built into the method to reduce false positive findings. Simulation studies demonstrate that the GWASelect performs well under a wide spectrum of linkage disequilibrium patterns and can be substantially more powerful than existing methods in capturing causal variants while having a lower FDR. In addition, the regression models based on the GWASelect tend to yield more accurate prediction of disease risk than existing methods. The advantages of the GWASelect are illustrated with the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium (WTCCC) data. AVAILABILITY: The software implementing GWASelect is available at http://www.bios.unc.edu/~lin. Access to WTCCC data: http://www.wtccc.org.uk/.