A scalable variational inference approach for increased mixed-model association power

The rapid growth of modern biobanks is creating new opportunities for large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and the analysis of complex traits. However, performing GWASs on millions of samples often leads to trade-offs between computational efficiency and statistical power, reducing the benefits of large-scale data collection efforts. We developed Quickdraws, a method that increases association power in quantitative and binary traits without sacrificing computational efficiency, leveraging a spike-and-slab prior on variant effects, stochastic variational inference and graphics processing unit acceleration. We applied Quickdraws to 79 quantitative and 50 binary traits in 405,088 UK Biobank samples, identifying 4.97% and 3.25% more associations than REGENIE and 22.71% and 7.07% more than FastGWA. Quickdraws had costs comparable to REGENIE, FastGWA and SAIGE on the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform service, while being substantially faster than BOLT-LMM. These results highlight the promise of leveraging machine learning techniques for scalable GWASs without sacrificing power or robustness.