Improving the signal-to-noise ratio in genome-wide association studies

Genome-wide association studies employ hundreds of thousands of statistical tests to determine which regions of the genome may likely harbor disease-causing alleles. Such large-scale testing simultaneously requires stringent control over type I error and maintenance of sufficient power to detect true associations. These contradictory goals have led some researchers beyond Bonferroni correction of P-values to an exploration of methods to improve the detection of a few true effects in the presence of many unassociated loci. This article reviews how Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Group 5 investigators proposed to adjust for multiple tests while simultaneously using information about the structure of the genome to improve the detection of true positives.