Benoit Liquet-Weiland March 25 at 10

On Tuesday, March 25 @ 10:00:

Benoit Liquet-Weiland, Macquarie University, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Australia

"Sparse Group Variable Selection for Pleiotropic Association in High-Dimensional Genomic Context"

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genetic variants associated with multiple complex diseases. We can leverage this phenomenon, known as pleiotropy, to integrate multiple data sources in a joint analysis. Often, integrating additional information such as gene pathway knowledge can improve statistical efficiency and biological interpretation. In this talk, I will review several frequentist and Bayesian statistical methods we have developed, which incorporate both gene pathway and pleiotropy knowledge to increase statistical power and identify important risk variants affecting multiple traits. Our methods are applied to identify potential pleiotropy in an application considering the joint analysis of thyroid and breast cancers.