Quantitative Issues in Cancer Research Working Seminar

Luke Benz
Doctoral Student, Department of Biostatistics, Harvard University

“mixWAS: A Federated Algorithm for Testing Variant Level Associations Across Mixed Type Phenotypes”

ABSTRACT: Methods that leverage cross-phenotype associations or pleiotropy in risk prediction have been shown to achieve improved performance compared to single-phenotype analyses. Before jointly analyzing multiple phenotypes in risk prediction models, we hope to obtain a list of candidate variants that are at least associated with one of the phenotypes of interest. With data from multiple biobanks, we propose a novel federated algorithm for testing the SNP-level association across multiple mixed type phenotypes, termed as mixWAS.