Search

Whole and targeted sequencing of human genomes is a promising, increasingly feasible tool for discovering genetic contributions to risk of complex diseases. A key step is calling an individual's genotype from the multiple aligned short read sequences of his DNA, each of which is subject to nucleotide read error. Current methods are designed to call genotypes separately at each locus from the sequence data of unrelated individuals. Here we propose likelihood-based methods that improve calling accuracy by exploiting two features of sequence data. The first is the linkage disequilibrium (LD) between nearby SNPs. The second is the Mendelian pedigree information available when related individuals are sequenced. In both cases the likelihood involves the probabilities of read variant counts given genotypes, summed over the unobserved genotypes. Parameters governing the prior genotype distribution and the read error rates can be estimated either from the sequence data itself or from external reference data. We use simulations and synthetic read data based on the 1000 Genomes Project to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. An R-program to apply the methods to small families is freely available at http://med.stanford.edu/epidemiology/PHGC/., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS527 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

Interest in targeted disease prevention has stimulated development of models that assign risks to individuals, using their personal covariates. We need to evaluate these models, and to quantify the gains achieved by expanding a model with additional covariates. We describe several performance measures for risk models, and show how they are related. Application of the measures to risk models for hypothetical populations and for postmenopausal US women illustrate several points. First, model performance is constrained by the distribution of true risks in the population. This complicates the comparison of two models if they are applied to populations with different covariate distributions. Second, the Brier Score and the Integrated Discrimination Improvement (IDI) are more useful than the concordance statistic for quantifying precision gains obtained from model expansion. Finally, these precision gains are apt to be small, although they may be large for some individuals. We propose a new way to identify these individuals, and show how to quantify how much they gain by measuring the additional covariates. Those with largest gains could be targeted for cost-efficient covariate assessment., Comment: 17 pages, 3 tables, and 5 figures