The Statistics of Gene Mapping

Abstracts not available for BookReview

Reconstructing DNA copy number by joint segmentation of multiple sequences

The variation in DNA copy number carries information on the modalities of genome evolution and misregulation of DNA replication in cancer cells; its study can be helpful to localize tumor suppressor genes, distinguish different populations of cancerous cell, as well identify genomic variations responsible for disease phenotypes. A number of different high throughput technologies can be used to identify copy number variable sites, and the literature documents multiple effective algorithms. We focus here on the specific problem of detecting regions where variation in copy number is relatively common in the sample at hand: this encompasses the cases of copy number polymorphisms, related samples, technical replicates, and cancerous sub-populations from the same individual. We present an algorithm based on regularization approaches with significant computational advantages and competitive accuracy. We illustrate its applicability with simulated and real data sets.Comment: 54 pages, 5 figure

Catch me if you can: Signal localization with knockoff e-values

We consider problems where many, somewhat redundant, hypotheses are tested and we are interested in reporting the most precise rejections, with false discovery rate (FDR) control. For example, a common goal in genetics is to identify DNA variants that carry distinct information on a trait of interest. However, strong local dependencies between nearby variants make it challenging to distinguish which of the many correlated features most directly influence the phenotype. A common solution is then to identify sets of variants that cover the truly important ones. Depending on the signal strengths, it is possible to resolve the individual variant contributions with more or less precision. Assuring FDR control on the reported findings with these adaptive searches is, however, often impossible. To design a multiple comparison procedure that allows for an adaptive choice of resolution with FDR control, we leverage e-values and linear programming. We adapt this approach to problems where knockoffs and group knockoffs have been successfully applied to test conditional independence hypotheses. We demonstrate its efficacy by analyzing data from the UK Biobank.Comment: 43 pages, 34 figures; text edit