gcatest

The GENESIS package provides methodology for estimating, inferring, and accounting for population and pedigree structure in genetic analyses. The current implementation provides functions to perform PC-AiR (Conomos et al., 2015, Gen Epi) and PC-Relate (Conomos et al., 2016, AJHG). PC-AiR performs a Principal Components Analysis on genome-wide SNP data for the detection of population structure in a sample that may contain known or cryptic relatedness. Unlike standard PCA, PC-AiR accounts for relatedness in the sample to provide accurate ancestry inference that is not confounded by family structure. PC-Relate uses ancestry representative principal components to adjust for population structure/ancestry and accurately estimate measures of recent genetic relatedness such as kinship coefficients, IBD sharing probabilities, and inbreeding coefficients. Additionally, functions are provided to perform efficient variance component estimation and mixed model association testing for both quantitative and binary phenotypes.

pathwayPCA is an integrative analysis tool that implements the principal component analysis (PCA) based pathway analysis approaches described in Chen et al. (2008), Chen et al. (2010), and Chen (2011). pathwayPCA allows users to: (1) Test pathway association with binary, continuous, or survival phenotypes. (2) Extract relevant genes in the pathways using the SuperPCA and AES-PCA approaches. (3) Compute principal components (PCs) based on the selected genes. These estimated latent variables represent pathway activities for individual subjects, which can then be used to perform integrative pathway analysis, such as multi-omics analysis. (4) Extract relevant genes that drive pathway significance as well as data corresponding to these relevant genes for additional in-depth analysis. (5) Perform analyses with enhanced computational efficiency with parallel computing and enhanced data safety with S4-class data objects. (6) Analyze studies with complex experimental designs, with multiple covariates, and with interaction effects, e.g., testing whether pathway association with clinical phenotype is different between male and female subjects. Citations: Chen et al. (2008) <https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btn458>; Chen et al. (2010) <https://doi.org/10.1002/gepi.20532>; and Chen (2011) <https://doi.org/10.2202/1544-6115.1697>.

Logistic Factor Analysis is a method for a PCA analogue on Binomial data via estimation of latent structure in the natural parameter. The main method estimates genetic population structure from genotype data. There are also methods for estimating individual-specific allele frequencies using the population structure. Lastly, a structured Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) test is developed, which quantifies the goodness of fit of the genotype data to the estimated population structure, via the estimated individual-specific allele frequencies (all of which generalizes traditional HWE tests).

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are widely used to investigate the genetic basis of diseases and traits, but they pose many computational challenges. We developed an R package SNPRelate to provide a binary format for single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data in GWAS utilizing CoreArray Genomic Data Structure (GDS) data files. The GDS format offers the efficient operations specifically designed for integers with two bits, since a SNP could occupy only two bits. SNPRelate is also designed to accelerate two key computations on SNP data using parallel computing for multi-core symmetric multiprocessing computer architectures: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and relatedness analysis using Identity-By-Descent measures. The SNP GDS format is also used by the GWASTools package with the support of S4 classes and generic functions. The extended GDS format is implemented in the SeqArray package to support the storage of single nucleotide variations (SNVs), insertion/deletion polymorphism (indel) and structural variation calls in whole-genome and whole-exome variant data.

This package provides functionality for interactive visualization of RNA-seq datasets based on Principal Components Analysis. The methods provided allow for quick information extraction and effective data exploration. A Shiny application encapsulates the whole analysis.

A novel framework to correct for batch effects prior to any downstream analysis in microbiome data based on Projection to Latent Structures Discriminant Analysis. The main method is named “PLSDA-batch”. It first estimates treatment and batch variation with latent components, then subtracts batch-associated components from the data whilst preserving biological variation of interest. PLSDA-batch is highly suitable for microbiome data as it is non-parametric, multivariate and allows for ordination and data visualisation. Combined with centered log-ratio transformation for addressing uneven library sizes and compositional structure, PLSDA-batch addresses all characteristics of microbiome data that existing correction methods have ignored so far. Two other variants are proposed for 1/ unbalanced batch x treatment designs that are commonly encountered in studies with small sample sizes, and for 2/ selection of discriminative variables amongst treatment groups to avoid overfitting in classification problems. These two variants have widened the scope of applicability of PLSDA-batch to different data settings.