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We show that epigenome- and transcriptome-wide association studies (EWAS and TWAS) are prone to significant inflation and bias of test statistics, an unrecognized phenomenon introducing spurious findings if left unaddressed. Neither GWAS-based methodology nor state-of-the-art confounder adjustment methods completely remove bias and inflation. We propose a Bayesian method to control bias and inflation in EWAS and TWAS based on estimation of the empirical null distribution. Using simulations and real data, we demonstrate that our method maximizes power while properly controlling the false positive rate. We illustrate the utility of our method in large-scale EWAS and TWAS meta-analyses of age and smoking.

Original publication

DOI

10.1186/s13059-016-1131-9

Type

Journal article

Journal

Genome Biol

Publication Date

27/01/2017

Volume

18

Keywords

Bias, Empirical null distribution, Epigenome- and transcriptome-wide association studies, Gibbs sampler, Inflation, Meta-analysis, Age Factors, Bayes Theorem, Bias, Epigenesis, Genetic, Epigenomics, Genome-Wide Association Study, Humans, Meta-Analysis as Topic, Smoking, Transcriptome