Re-assessment of multiple testing strategies for more efficient genome-wide association studies

Although enormous costs have been dedicated to discovering relevant disease-related genetic variants, especially in genome-wide association studies (GWASs), only a small fraction of estimated heritability can be explained by these results. This is the so-called missing heritability problem. The conventional use of overly conservative multiple testing strategies based on controlling the familywise error rate (FWER), in particular with a genome-wide significance threshold of P <5 × 10^-8, is one of the most important issues from a statistical perspective. To help resolve this problem, we performed comprehensive re-assessments of currently available strategies using recently published, extremely large-scale GWAS data sets of rheumatoid arthritis and schizophrenia (>50,000 subjects). The estimates of statistical power averaged for all disease-related genetic variants of the standard FWER-based strategy were only 0.09% for the rheumatoid arthritis data and 0.04% for the schizophrenia data. To design more efficient strategies, we also conducted an extensive comparison of multiple testing strategies by applying false discovery rate (FDR)-controlling procedures to these data sets and simulations, and found that the FDR-based procedures achieved higher power than the FWER-based strategy, even at a strict FDR level (e.g., FDR = 1%). We also discuss a useful alternative measure, namely "partial power," which is an averaged power for detecting the clinically and biologically meaningful genetic factors with the largest effects. Simulation results suggest that the FDR-based procedures can achieve sufficient partial power (>80%) for detecting these factors (odds ratios of >1.05) with 80,000 subjects, and thus this may be a useful measure for defining realistic objectives of future GWASs.