A Functional Approach to Testing Overall Effect of Interaction Between DNA Methylation and SNPs

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel functional data analysis-based test to detect the overall interaction effect between DNA methylation and SNPs on phenotypes, improving power over existing methods.

Contribution

It introduces a new statistical test for interaction effects that extends regression models in functional data analysis, with demonstrated effectiveness through simulations and real data.

Findings

Effective control of type I error rates.

Higher empirical power in detecting interactions.

Successful application to obesity-related data.

Abstract

We introduce a test for the overall effect of interaction between DNA methylation and a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on a quantitative phenotype. The developed inference procedure is based on a functional approach that extends existing regression models in functional data analysis. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed test effectively controls type I error rates and highlights increased empirical power over existing methods, particularly when multiple interactions are present. The use of the proposed test is illustrated with an application to data from obesity patients and controls.