Sparse Simultaneous Signal Detection and Its Applications in Genomics
报告人: Hongzhe Li, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
时间:2016-06-28 14:00 ~ 15:00
地点:理科一号楼1114
Abstract:
The increasing availability of large-scale genomic data has made possible an integrative approach to studying disease. Such research seeks to uncover disease mechanisms by combining multiple types of genomic information, which may be collected on multiple sets of patients. I will focus on a study that integrates GWAS and eQTL data collected from two different sets of subjects to find transcripts potentially functionally relevant to human heart failure. I will first formalize a model that defines important transcripts as those whose expression levels are associated with SNPs that are simultaneously associated with disease. I will then propose a new procedure to test for the existence of these simultaneous signals, show that the test statistic is asymptotically optimal under certain conditions and provide a procedure to obtain finite-sample p-values. I will apply the proposed test to a heart failure study at Penn (MAGNet) to identify potentially important transcripts that are mechanistically associated with human heart failure. Finally, I will also briefly present a related problem of optimal detection of weak positive dependence between two mixture distributions and show its application in gene set enrichment analysis.
About the Speaker:
Professor Li received a Ph.D. degree in Statistics in 1995 from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Professor Elizabeth Thompson. He worked as a research associate biostatistician in the Section of Biostatistics at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for three years. He then joined the Rowe Program in Human Genetics at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine in the fall of 1998 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2001. He joined the University of Pennsylvania as a Professor of Biostatistics with tenure in May 2005. From April to June and also August 2004 he was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Statsitics at Stanford University. From September 2011 to now, he is also a Professor of Statistics with a secondary appointment in the Department of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and elected member of the International Statistical Institute.