An enhanced version of Cochran-Armitage trend test for genome-wide association studies

Meta Gene. 2016 Jul 22:9:225-9. doi: 10.1016/j.mgene.2016.07.001. eCollection 2016 Sep.

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies the evaluation of association between candidate gene and disease status is widely carried out using Cochran-Armitage trend test. However, only a small number of research papers have evaluated the distribution of p-values for the Cochran-Armitage trend test. In this paper, an enhanced version of Cochran-Armitage trend test based on bootstrap approach is introduced. The achieved results confirm that the distribution of p-values of the proposed approach fits better to the uniform distribution, and it is thus concluded that the proposed method, which needs less assumptions in comparison with the conventional method, can be successfully used to test the genetic association.

Keywords: Bootstrap method; Chi-squared test; Contingency table; Genetic association; Monte Carlo simulation; p-values.