Bayesian sigmoid shrinkage with improper variance priors and an application to wavelet denoising

A Bayesian Shrinkage Approach for AMMI Models

Linear-bilinear models, especially the additive main effects and multiplicative interaction (AMMI) model, are widely applicable to genotype-by-environment interaction (GEI) studies in plant breeding programs. These models allow a parsimonious modeling of GE interactions, retaining a small number of principal components in the analysis. However, one aspect of the AMMI model that is still debated is the selection criteria for determining the number of multiplicative terms required to describe the GE interaction pattern. Shrinkage estimators have been proposed as selection criteria for the GE interaction components. In this study, a Bayesian approach was combined with the AMMI model with shrinkage estimators for the principal components. A total of 55 maize genotypes were evaluated in nine different environments using a complete blocks design with three replicates. The results show that the traditional Bayesian AMMI model produces low shrinkage of singular values but avoids the usual pitfalls in determining the credible intervals in the biplot. On the other hand, Bayesian shrinkage AMMI models have difficulty with the credible interval for model parameters, but produce stronger shrinkage of the principal components, converging to GE matrices that have more shrinkage than those obtained using mixed models. This characteristic allowed more parsimonious models to be chosen, and resulted in models being selected that were similar to those obtained by the Cornelius F-test (α = 0.05) in traditional AMMI models and cross validation based on leave-one-out. This characteristic allowed more parsimonious models to be chosen and more GEI pattern retained on the first two components. The resulting model chosen by posterior distribution of singular value was also similar to those produced by the cross-validation approach in traditional AMMI models. Our method enables the estimation of credible interval for AMMI biplot plus the choice of AMMI model based on direct posterior distribution retaining more GEI pattern in the first components and discarding noise without Gaussian assumption as requested in F-based tests or deal with parametric problems as observed in traditional AMMI shrinkage method.

Bayesian Nonparametric Shrinkage Applied to Cepheid Star Oscillations

Bayesian nonparametric regression with dependent wavelets has dual shrinkage properties: there is shrinkage through a dependent prior put on functional differences, and shrinkage through the setting of most of the wavelet coefficients to zero through Bayesian variable selection methods. The methodology can deal with unequally spaced data and is efficient because of the existence of fast moves in model space for the MCMC computation. The methodology is illustrated on the problem of modeling the oscillations of Cepheid variable stars; these are a class of pulsating variable stars with the useful property that their periods of variability are strongly correlated with their absolute luminosity. Once this relationship has been calibrated, knowledge of the period gives knowledge of the luminosity. This makes these stars useful as "standard candles" for estimating distances in the universe.

Genomic selection and complex trait prediction using a fast EM algorithm applied to genome-wide markers

Background

The information provided by dense genome-wide markers using high throughput technology is of considerable potential in human disease studies and livestock breeding programs. Genome-wide association studies relate individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) from dense SNP panels to individual measurements of complex traits, with the underlying assumption being that any association is caused by linkage disequilibrium (LD) between SNP and quantitative trait loci (QTL) affecting the trait. Often SNP are in genomic regions of no trait variation. Whole genome Bayesian models are an effective way of incorporating this and other important prior information into modelling. However a full Bayesian analysis is often not feasible due to the large computational time involved.

Results

This article proposes an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm called emBayesB which allows only a proportion of SNP to be in LD with QTL and incorporates prior information about the distribution of SNP effects. The posterior probability of being in LD with at least one QTL is calculated for each SNP along with estimates of the hyperparameters for the mixture prior. A simulated example of genomic selection from an international workshop is used to demonstrate the features of the EM algorithm. The accuracy of prediction is comparable to a full Bayesian analysis but the EM algorithm is considerably faster. The EM algorithm was accurate in locating QTL which explained more than 1% of the total genetic variation. A computational algorithm for very large SNP panels is described.

Conclusions

emBayesB is a fast and accurate EM algorithm for implementing genomic selection and predicting complex traits by mapping QTL in genome-wide dense SNP marker data. Its accuracy is similar to Bayesian methods but it takes only a fraction of the time.

Predicting quantitative traits with regression models for dense molecular markers and pedigree

The availability of genomewide dense markers brings opportunities and challenges to breeding programs. An important question concerns the ways in which dense markers and pedigrees, together with phenotypic records, should be used to arrive at predictions of genetic values for complex traits. If a large number of markers are included in a regression model, marker-specific shrinkage of regression coefficients may be needed. For this reason, the Bayesian least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) (BL) appears to be an interesting approach for fitting marker effects in a regression model. This article adapts the BL to arrive at a regression model where markers, pedigrees, and covariates other than markers are considered jointly. Connections between BL and other marker-based regression models are discussed, and the sensitivity of BL with respect to the choice of prior distributions assigned to key parameters is evaluated using simulation. The proposed model was fitted to two data sets from wheat and mouse populations, and evaluated using cross-validation methods. Results indicate that inclusion of markers in the regression further improved the predictive ability of models. An R program that implements the proposed model is freely available.