SNPHarvester: a filtering-based approach for detecting epistatic interactions in genome-wide association studies

摘要

Motivation: Hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are available for genome-wide association (GWA) studies nowadays. The epistatic interactions of SNPs are believed to be very important in determining individual susceptibility to complex diseases. However, existing methods for SNP interaction discovery either suffer from high computation complexity or perform poorly when marginal effects of disease loci are weak or absent. Hence, it is desirable to develop an effective method to search epistatic interactions in genome-wide scale.