Seunggeun Lee

Several biobanks, including UK Biobank (UKBB), are generating large-scale sequencing data. An existing method, SAIGE-GENE, performs well when testing variants with minor allele frequency (MAF) ≤ 1%, but inflation is observed in variance component set-based tests when restricting to variants with MAF ≤ 0.1% or 0.01%. Here, we propose SAIGE-GENE+ with greatly improved type I error control and computational efficiency to facilitate rare variant tests in large-scale data. We further show that incorp

Abstract In genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for thousands of phenotypes in large biobanks, most binary traits have substantially fewer cases than controls. Both of the widely used approaches, linear mixed model and the recently proposed logistic mixed model, perform poorly – producing large type I error rates – in the analysis of phenotypes with unbalanced case-control ratios. Here we propose a scalable and accurate generalized mixed model association test that uses the saddlepoint approx

A number of settings arise in which it is of interest to predict Principal Component (PC) scores for new observations using data from an initial sample. In this paper, we demonstrate that naive approaches to PC score prediction can be substantially biased towards 0 in the analysis of large matrices. This phenomenon is largely related to known inconsistency results for sample eigenvalues and eigenvectors as both dimensions of the matrix increase. For the spiked eigenvalue model for random matrice

As most existing genome-wide association studies (GWASs) were conducted in European-ancestry cohorts, and as the existing polygenic risk score (PRS) models have limited transferability across ancestry groups, PRS research on non-European-ancestry groups needs to make efficient use of available data until we attain large sample sizes across all ancestry groups. Here we propose a PRS method using transfer learning techniques. Our approach, TL-PRS, uses gradient descent to fine-tune the baseline PR

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on diverse ancestry groups are lacking, resulting in deficits of genetic discoveries and polygenic scores. We conducted GWAS for 76 phenotypes in Korean biobank data, namely the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES) (n = 72,298). Our analysis discovered 2,242 associated loci, including 122 novel associations, many of which were replicated in Biobank Japan (BBJ) GWAS. We also applied several up-to-date methods for genetic association tests to increase

In genetic association analysis, a joint test of multiple distinct phenotypes can increase power to identify sets of trait-associated variants within genes or regions of interest. Existing multiphenotype tests for rare variants make specific assumptions about the patterns of association with underlying causal variants, and the violation of these assumptions can reduce power to detect association. Here, we develop a general framework for testing pleiotropic effects of rare variants on multiple co

For aggregation tests of genes or regions, the set of included variants often have small total minor allele counts (MACs), and this is particularly true when the most deleterious sets of variants are considered. When MAC is low, commonly used asymptotic tests are not well calibrated for binary phenotypes and can have conservative or anti-conservative results and potential power loss. Empirical p-values obtained via resampling methods are computationally costly for highly significant p-values and

MOTIVATION: Population stratification (PS) is a major confounder in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and can lead to false-positive associations. To adjust for PS, principal component analysis (PCA)-based ancestry prediction has been widely used. Simple projection (SP) based on principal component loadings and the recently developed data augmentation, decomposition and Procrustes (ADP) transformation, such as LASER and TRACE, are popular methods for predicting PC scores. However, the predi

Abstract With very large sample sizes, population-based cohorts and biobanks provide an exciting opportunity to identify genetic components of complex traits. To analyze rare variants, gene or region-based multiple variant aggregate tests are commonly used to increase association test power. However, due to the substantial computation cost, existing region-based rare variant tests cannot analyze hundreds of thousands of samples while accounting for confounders, such as population stratification