Comparison of dimension reduction-based logistic regression models for case-control genome-wide association study:principal components analysis vs.partial least squares

With recent advances in biotechnology, genome-wide association study （GWAS） has been widely used to identify genetic variants that underlie human complex diseases and traits. In case-control GWAS, typical statistical strategy is traditional logistical regression （LR） based on single-locus analysis. However, such a single-locus analysis leads to the well-known multiplicity problem, with a risk of inflating type I error and reducing power. Dimension reduction-based techniques, such as principal component-based logistic regression （PC-LR）, partial least squares-based logistic regression （PLS-LR）, have recently gained much attention in the analysis of high dimensional genomic data. However, the perfor- mance of these methods is still not clear, especially in GWAS. We conducted simulations and real data application to compare the type I error and power of PC-LR, PLS-LR and LR applicable to GWAS within a defined single nucleotide polymorphism （SNP） set region. We found that PC-LR and PLS can reasonably control type I error under null hypothesis. On contrast, LR, which is corrected by Bonferroni method, was more conserved in all simulation settings. In particular, we found that PC-LR and PLS-LR had comparable power and they both outperformed LR, especially when the causal SNP was in high linkage disequilibrium with genotyped ones and with a small effective size in simulation. Based on SNP set analysis, we applied all three methods to analyze non-small cell lung cancer GWAS data.