Computationally efficient correlation of genetic effects with function-valued traits

Abstract

This disclosure presents a model for identifying correlations in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with function-valued traits that provides increased power and computational efficiency by use of a Gaussian process regression with radial basis function (RBF) kernels to model the function-valued traits and specialized factorizations to achieve speed. A Gaussian Process is assigned to each partition for each allele of a given single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) which yields flexible alternative models and handles a large number of data points in a way that is statistically and computationally efficient. This model provides techniques for handling missing and unaligned function values such as would occur when not all individuals are measured at the same time points. If the data is complete algebraic re-factorization by decomposition into Kronecker products reduces the time complexity of this model thereby increasing processing speed and reducing memory usage as compared to a naive implementation.