Evaluating the performance of gene-based tests of genetic association when testing for association between methylation and change in triglyceride levels at GAW20

BMC Proc. 2018 Sep 17;12(Suppl 9):50. doi: 10.1186/s12919-018-0124-y. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Although methylation data continues to rise in popularity, much is still unknown about how to best analyze methylation data in genome-wide analysis contexts. Given continuing interest in gene-based tests for next-generation sequencing data, we evaluated the performance of novel gene-based test statistics on simulated data from GAW20. Our analysis suggests that most of the gene-based tests are detecting real signals and maintaining the Type I error rate. The minimum p value and threshold-based tests performed well compared to single-marker tests in many cases, especially when the number of variants was relatively large with few true causal variants in the set.