A General Approach to Genome Scans Using Importance Sampling

Daniel Q. Naiman

Department of Mathematical Sciences
Johns Hopkins University

Friday, September 27, at 327 Yost
Refreshments: 3:00 - 3:30 p.m, Talk: 3:30 - 4:30 p.m.

It is now a widespread practice for researchers to base conclusions about the inheritance of disease by scanning large portions of the genome and conducting a vast number of simultaneous hypothesis tests. A key question to address is that of determining the probability of a false rejection, that is, of incorrectly identifying a genetic marker as linked with disease. This talk will present a general to approximating overall error rates using an importance sampling algorithm given in Naiman and Priebe (2001). The basic idea is to generate samples conditioned on the event that a hypothesis is rejected. A standard genetic procedure known as the affected sib pair test, will be described and used to illustrate the method. Principles of efficient Monte Carlo simulation via fast Fourier transforms, and concepts related to conditioning Gaussian samples, will be described.


This is joint work with James Malley (NIH) and Joan Bailey-Wilson (CIDR)
Questions? Nidhan Choudhuri