Robust data-driven identification of risk factors and their interactions: A simulation and a study of parental and...

Few interactions between risk factors for schizophrenia have been replicated, but fitting all such interactions is difficult due to high-dimensionality. Our aims are to examine significant main and interaction effects for schizophrenia and the performance of our approach using simulated data.

We apply the machine learning technique elastic net to a high-dimensional logistic regression model to produce a sparse set of predictors, and then assess the significance of odds ratios (OR) with Bonferroni-corrected p-values and confidence intervals (CI). We introduce a simulation model that resembles a Finnish nested case-control study of schizophrenia which uses national registers to identify cases (n = 1,468) and controls (n = 2,975). The predictors include nine sociodemographic factors and all interactions (31 predictors).

In the simulation, interactions with OR = 3 and prevalence = 4% were identified with <5% false positive rate and ≥80% power. None of the studied interactions were significantly associated with schizophrenia, but main effects of parental psychosis (OR = 5.2, CI 2.9-9.7; p < .001), urbanicity (1.3, 1.1-1.7; p = .001), and paternal age ≥35 (1.3, 1.004-1.6; p = .04) were significant.

We have provided an analytic pipeline for data-driven identification of main and interaction effects in case-control data. We identified highly replicated main effects for schizophrenia, but no interactions.