Abstract:

In the past few years, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified hundreds of common genetic variants (minor allele frequency (MAF) > 5%) for complex human diseases. However, these common variants can only explain a small proportion of heritability. Uncommon variants (MAF < 5%) are likely to play an important role in the missing heritability that cannot be explained by common variants. However, detecting uncommon causal variants is difficult with commercial single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays that are designed to capture common variants (MAF > 5%). Haplotypes can provide insights into underlying linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure and can tag uncommon variants that are not well tagged by common variants. In this work, we propose a wei-SIMc-matching test that inversely weights haplotype similarities with the estimated standard deviation of haplotype counts, to boost the power of similarity-based approaches for detecting uncommon causal variants. We then compare the power of the wei-SIMc-matching test with that of several popular haplotype-based tests, including four other similarity-based tests, a global score test for haplotypes (global), a test based on the maximum score statistic over all haplotypes (max), and two newly proposed haplotype-based tests for rare variant detection. With systematic simulations under a wide range of LD patterns, the results show that wei-SIMc-matching and global are the two most powerful tests. Among these two tests, wei-SIMc-matching has reliable asymptotic P values, whereas global needs permutations to obtain reliable P values when the frequencies of some haplotype categories are low or when the trait is skewed. Therefore, we recommend wei-SIMc-matching for detecting uncommon causal variants with surrounding common SNPs, in light of its power and computational feasibility.