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case western reserve university

DEPT OF STATISTICS

 

SEMINARS

 

 
Spring 2008
STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM

 

Wednesday, March 26, 2008
3:30-4:00—Refreshments, Yost 327
4:00-5:00—Talk, Yost 101

Xiaofeng Zhu, PhD

Division of Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Case Western Reserve University

Genetic Association Analysis and Population Structure

Population based association studies have been considered more powerful than family-based linkage studies in the genetic dissection of complex diseases. Genome-wide association studies have successfully identified many genetic variants associated with a variety of diseases. A challenge of large population sample based association studies is the spurious association due to population structure. In this talk I will discuss a variety of methods to control the effect due to the population structure in genetic association studies. I will also introduce a unified approach that can incorporate both family and case-control samples, at the same time corrects for population stratification. This unified approach makes it unnecessary to perform a conditional analysis of the family data, and is more powerful than the separate analyses of unrelated and family samples, or a meta-analysis performed by combining the results of the usual separate analyses.