Sparse Model Building From Genome-Wide Variation With Graphical Models

Logsdon, Benjamin

Sparse Model Building From Genome-Wide Variation With Graphical Models

Abstract

High throughput sequencing and expression characterization have lead to an explosion of phenotypic and genotypic molecular data underlying both experimental studies and outbred populations. We develop a novel class of algorithms to reconstruct sparse models among these molecular phenotypes (e.g. expression products) and genotypes (e.g. single nucleotide polymorphisms), via both a Bayesian hierarchical model, when the sample size is much smaller than the model dimension (i.e. p n) and the well characterized adaptive lasso algo- rithm. Specifically, we propose novel approaches to the problems of increasing power to detect additional loci in genome-wide association studies using our variational algorithm, efficiently learning directed cyclic graphs from expression and genotype data using the adaptive lasso, and constructing genomewide undirected graphs among genotype, expression and downstream phenotype data using an extension of the variational feature selection algorithm. The Bayesian hierarchical model is derived for a parametric multiple regression model with a mixture prior of a point mass and normal distribution for each regression coefficient, and appropriate priors for the set of hyperparameters. When combined with a probabilistic consistency bound on the model dimension, this approach leads to very sparse solutions without the need for cross validation. We use a variational Bayes approximate inference approach in our algorithm, where we impose a complete factorization across all parameters for the approximate posterior distribution, and then minimize the KullbackLeibler divergence between the approximate and true posterior distributions. Since the prior distribution is non-convex, we restart the algorithm many times to find multiple posterior modes, and combine information across all discovered modes in an approximate Bayesian model averaging framework, to reduce the variance of the posterior probability estimates. We perform analysis of three major publicly available data-sets: the HapMap 2 genotype and expression data collected on immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines, the genome-wide gene expression and genetic marker data collected for a yeast intercross, and genomewide gene expression, genetic marker, and downstream phenotypes related to weight in a mouse F2 intercross. Based on both simulations and data analysis we show that our algorithms can outperform other state of the art model selection procedures when including thousands to hundreds of thousands of genotypes and expression traits, in terms of aggressively controlling false discovery rate, and generating rich simultaneous statistical models.

Date Issued

2011-01-31

Keywords

Variational Bayes; Gene expression network reconstruction; Graphical models

Committee Chair

Mezey, Jason G.

Committee Member

Clark, Andrew
Bustamante, Carlos D.
Wells, Martin Timothy

Degree Discipline

Computational Biology

Degree Name

Ph. D., Computational Biology

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

Types

dissertation or thesis