Learning hierarchical Bayesian networks for genome-wide association studies

Abstract

We describe a novel probabilistic graphical model customized to represent the statistical dependencies between genetic markers, in the Human genome. Our proposal relies on a forest of hierarchical latent class models. The motivation is to reduce the dimension of the data to be further submitted to statistical association tests with respect to diseased/non diseased status. A generic algorithm, CFHLC, has been designed to tackle the learning of both forest structure and probability distributions. A first implementation has been shown to be tractable on benchmarks describing 105 variables for 2000 individuals. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.