Miscellanea Dependent generalized functional linear models

A function-based approach to model the measurement error in wearable devices

Physical activity (PA) is an important risk factor for many health outcomes. Wearable-devices such as accelerometers are increasingly used in biomedical studies to understand the associations between PA and health outcomes. Statistical analyses involving accelerometer data are challenging due to the following three characteristics: (i) high-dimensionality, (ii) temporal dependence, and (iii) measurement error. To address these challenges we treat accelerometer-based measures of PA as a single function-valued covariate prone to measurement error. Specifically, in order to determine the relationship between PA and a health outcome of interest, we propose a regression model with a functional covariate that accounts for measurement error. Using regression calibration, we develop a two-step estimation method for the model parameters and establish their consistency. A test is also proposed to test the significance of the estimated model parameters. Simulation studies are conducted to compare the proposed methods with existing alternative approaches under varying scenarios. Finally, the developed methods are used to assess the relationship between PA intensity and BMI obtained from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data.

Integrative functional linear model for genome-wide association studies with multiple traits

In recent biomedical research, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have demonstrated great success in investigating the genetic architecture of human diseases. For many complex diseases, multiple correlated traits have been collected. However, most of the existing GWAS are still limited because they analyze each trait separately without considering their correlations and suffer from a lack of sufficient information. Moreover, the high dimensionality of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data still poses tremendous challenges to statistical methods, in both theoretical and practical aspects. In this article, we innovatively propose an integrative functional linear model for GWAS with multiple traits. This study is the first to approximate SNPs as functional objects in a joint model of multiple traits with penalization techniques. It effectively accommodates the high dimensionality of SNPs and correlations among multiple traits to facilitate information borrowing. Our extensive simulation studies demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed method in the identification and estimation of disease-associated genetic variants, compared to four alternatives. The analysis of type 2 diabetes data leads to biologically meaningful findings with good prediction accuracy and selection stability.