The Division of Biostatistics at the Department of Preventive Medicine, UTHSC, invites you to attend the following seminar.
Time: Monday, April 22, 2:00 pm-3:00 pm CT
ZOOM Virtual Room Connection: Register in advance for this meeting
Seminar Website: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/biostatisticsseminar
Speaker Bio: https://www.lorincrawford.com/
Probabilistic methods to identify multi-scale enrichment in genomic sequencing studies
Lorin Crawford, Ph.D.
School of Public Health, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
A consistent theme of the work done in my lab group is to take modern computational approaches and develop theory that enable their interpretations to be related back to classical genomic principles. The central aim of this talk is to address variable selection questions in nonlinear and nonparametric regression. Motivated by statistical genetics, where nonlinear interactions and non-additive variation are of particular interest, we introduce a novel, interpretable, and computationally efficient way to summarize the relative importance of predictor variables. Methodologically, we present flexible and scalable classes of Bayesian models which provide interpretable probabilistic summaries such as posterior inclusion probabilities and credible sets for association mapping tasks in high-dimensional studies. We illustrate the benefits of our methods over state-of-the-art linear approaches using extensive simulations. We also demonstrate the ability of these methods to recover both novel and previously discovered genomic associations using real human complex traits from the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), the Framingham Heart Study, and the UK Biobank.