Leveraging functional annotations in genetic risk prediction for human complex diseases.

Genetic risk prediction is an important goal in human genetics research and precision medicine. Accurate prediction models will have great impacts on both disease prevention and early treatment strategies. Despite the identification of thousands of disease-associated genetic variants through genome...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yiming Hu, Qiongshi Lu, Ryan Powles, Xinwei Yao, Can Yang, Fang Fang, Xinran Xu, Hongyu Zhao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017-06-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5481142?pdf=render
Description
Summary:Genetic risk prediction is an important goal in human genetics research and precision medicine. Accurate prediction models will have great impacts on both disease prevention and early treatment strategies. Despite the identification of thousands of disease-associated genetic variants through genome wide association studies (GWAS), genetic risk prediction accuracy remains moderate for most diseases, which is largely due to the challenges in both identifying all the functionally relevant variants and accurately estimating their effect sizes in the presence of linkage disequilibrium. In this paper, we introduce AnnoPred, a principled framework that leverages diverse types of genomic and epigenomic functional annotations in genetic risk prediction for complex diseases. AnnoPred is trained using GWAS summary statistics in a Bayesian framework in which we explicitly model various functional annotations and allow for linkage disequilibrium estimated from reference genotype data. Compared with state-of-the-art risk prediction methods, AnnoPred achieves consistently improved prediction accuracy in both extensive simulations and real data.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358