JS-MA: A Jensen-Shannon Divergence Based Method for Mapping Genome-Wide Associations on Multiple Diseases

Taking advantage of the high-throughput genotyping technology of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP), Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWASs) have been successfully implemented for defining the relative role of genes and the environment in disease risk, assisting in enabling preventative and precision medicine. However, current multi-locus-based methods are insufficient in terms of computational cost and discrimination power to detect statistically significant interactions with different genetic effects on multifarious diseases. Statistical tests for multi-locus interactions (≥2 SNPs) raise huge analytical challenges because computational cost increases exponentially as the growth of the cardinality of SNPs in an interaction module. In this paper, we develop a simple, fast, and powerful method, named JS-MA, based on Jensen-Shannon divergence and agglomerative hierarchical clustering, to detect the genome-wide multi-locus interactions associated with multiple diseases. From the systematical simulation, JS-MA is more powerful and efficient compared with the state-of-the-art association mapping tools. JS-MA was applied to the real GWAS datasets for two common diseases, i.e., Rheumatoid Arthritis and Type 1 Diabetes. The results showed that JS-MA not only confirmed recently reported, biologically meaningful associations, but also identified novel multi-locus interactions. Therefore, we believe that JS-MA is suitable and efficient for a full-scale analysis of multi-disease-related interactions in the large GWASs.