Volume 13, Issue 1

Fernández-Durán, J. J. (2004): “Circular distributions based on nonnegative trigonometric sums ,” Biometrics, 60, 499–503, developed a family of univariate circular distributions based on nonnegative trigonometric sums. In this work, we extend this family of distributions to the multivariate case by using multiple nonnegative trigonometric sums to model the joint distribution of a vector of angular random variables. Practical examples of vectors of angular random variables include the wind direction at different monitoring stations, the directions taken by an animal on different occasions, the times at which a person performs different daily activities, and the dihedral angles of a protein molecule. We apply the proposed new family of multivariate distributions to three real data-sets: two for the study of protein structure and one for genomics. The first is related to the study of a bivariate vector of dihedral angles in proteins. In the second real data-set, we compare the fit of the proposed multivariate model with the bivariate generalized von Mises model of [Shieh, G. S., S. Zheng, R. A. Johnson, Y.-F. Chang, K. Shimizu, C.-C. Wang, and S.-L. Tang (2011): “Modeling and comparing the organization of circular genomes,” Bioinformatics, 27(7), 912–918.] in a problem related to orthologous genes in pairs of circular genomes. The third real data-set consists of observed values of three dihedral angles in γ -turns in a protein and serves as an example of trivariate angular data. In addition, a simulation algorithm is presented to generate realizations from the proposed multivariate angular distribution.

With the increasing availability of experimental data on gene interactions, modeling of gene regulatory pathways has gained special attention. Gradient descent algorithms have been widely used for regression and classification applications. Unfortunately, results obtained after training a model by gradient descent are often highly variable. In this paper, we present a new second order learning rule based on the Newton’s method for inferring optimal gene regulatory pathways. Unlike the gradient descent method, the proposed optimization rule is independent of the learning parameter. The flow vectors are estimated based on biomass conservation. A set of constraints is formulated incorporating weighting coefficients. The method calculates the maximal expression of the target gene starting from a given initial gene through these weighting coefficients. Our algorithm has been benchmarked and validated on certain types of functions and on some gene regulatory networks, gathered from literature. The proposed method has been found to perform better than the gradient descent learning. Extensive performance comparison with the extreme pathway analysis method has underlined the effectiveness of our proposed methodology.

Multiple comparisons or multiple testing has been viewed as a thorny issue in genetic association studies aiming to detect disease-associated genetic variants from a large number of genotyped variants. We alleviate the problem of multiple comparisons by proposing a hierarchical modeling approach that is fundamentally different from the existing methods. The proposed hierarchical models simultaneously fit as many variables as possible and shrink unimportant effects towards zero. Thus, the hierarchical models yield more efficient estimates of parameters than the traditional methods that analyze genetic variants separately, and also coherently address the multiple comparisons problem due to largely reducing the effective number of genetic effects and the number of statistically “significant” effects. We develop a method for computing the effective number of genetic effects in hierarchical generalized linear models, and propose a new adjustment for multiple comparisons, the hierarchical Bonferroni correction, based on the effective number of genetic effects. Our approach not only increases the power to detect disease-associated variants but also controls the Type I error. We illustrate and evaluate our method with real and simulated data sets from genetic association studies. The method has been implemented in our freely available R package BhGLM (http://www.ssg.uab.edu/bhglm/).

DNA microarray experiments require the use of multiple hypothesis testing procedures because thousands of hypotheses are simultaneously tested. We deal with this problem from a Bayesian decision theory perspective. We propose a decision criterion based on an estimation of the number of false null hypotheses (FNH), taking as an error measure the proportion of the posterior expected number of false positives with respect to the estimated number of true null hypotheses. The methodology is applied to a Gaussian model when testing bilateral hypotheses. The procedure is illustrated with both simulated and real data examples and the results are compared to those obtained by the Bayes rule when an additive loss function is considered for each joint action and the generalized loss 0–1 function for each individual action. Our procedure significantly reduced the percentage of false negatives whereas the percentage of false positives remains at an acceptable level.

A central statistical goal is to choose between alternative explanatory models of data. In many modern applications, such as population genetics, it is not possible to apply standard methods based on evaluating the likelihood functions of the models, as these are numerically intractable. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a commonly used alternative for such situations. ABC simulates data x for many parameter values under each model, which is compared to the observed data x obs . More weight is placed on models under which S ( x ) is close to S ( x obs ), where S maps data to a vector of summary statistics. Previous work has shown the choice of S is crucial to the efficiency and accuracy of ABC. This paper provides a method to select good summary statistics for model choice. It uses a preliminary step, simulating many x values from all models and fitting regressions to this with the model as response. The resulting model weight estimators are used as S in an ABC analysis. Theoretical results are given to justify this as approximating low dimensional sufficient statistics. A substantive application is presented: choosing between competing coalescent models of demographic growth for Campylobacter jejuni in New Zealand using multi-locus sequence typing data.

To locate multiple interacting quantitative trait loci (QTL) influencing a trait of interest within experimental populations, usually methods as the Cockerham’s model are applied. Within this framework, interactions are understood as the part of the joined effect of several genes which cannot be explained as the sum of their additive effects. However, if a change in the phenotype (as disease) is caused by Boolean combinations of genotypes of several QTLs, this Cockerham’s approach is often not capable to identify them properly. To detect such interactions more efficiently, we propose a logic regression framework. Even though with the logic regression approach a larger number of models has to be considered (requiring more stringent multiple testing correction) the efficient representation of higher order logic interactions in logic regression models leads to a significant increase of power to detect such interactions as compared to a Cockerham’s approach. The increase in power is demonstrated analytically for a simple two-way interaction model and illustrated in more complex settings with simulation study and real data analysis.

In many biological applications it is necessary to cluster DNA sequences into groups that represent underlying organismal units, such as named species or genera. In metagenomics this grouping needs typically to be achieved on the basis of relatively short sequences which contain different types of errors, making the use of a statistical modeling approach desirable. Here we introduce a novel method for this purpose by developing a stochastic partition model that clusters Markov chains of a given order. The model is based on a Dirichlet process prior and we use conjugate priors for the Markov chain parameters which enables an analytical expression for comparing the marginal likelihoods of any two partitions. To find a good candidate for the posterior mode in the partition space, we use a hybrid computational approach which combines the EM-algorithm with a greedy search. This is demonstrated to be faster and yield highly accurate results compared to earlier suggested clustering methods for the metagenomics application. Our model is fairly generic and could also be used for clustering of other types of sequence data for which Markov chains provide a reasonable way to compress information, as illustrated by experiments on shotgun sequence type data from an Escherichia coli strain.