Two-stage analysis strategy for identifying the IgM quantitative trait locus

Genetic association studies offer an opportunity to find genetic variants underlying complex human diseases. Various tests have been developed to improve their power. However, none of these tests is uniformly best and it is usually unclear at the outset what test is best for a specific dataset. For example, Hotelling's T2 test is best for normally distributed data, but it can lose considerable power when normality is not met. To achieve satisfactory power in most cases, without compromising the overall significance level, we propose to adopt a two-stage adaptive analysis strategy - several statistics are compared on a portion of the samples at the first stage and the most powerful statistic is then used for the remaining samples. We evaluated this procedure by mapping the quantitative trait locus of IgM with the simulated data in Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 Problem 3. The results show that the gain in power of the two-stage adaptive analysis procedure could be considerable when the initial choice of test statistic is wrong, whereas the loss is relatively small in the case that the optimal test chosen initially is correct.