An empirical fuzzy multifactor dimensionality reduction method for detecting gene-gene interactions.
Journal:
BMC genomics
PMID:
28361694
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Detection of gene-gene interaction (GGI) is a key challenge towards solving the problem of missing heritability in genetics. The multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) method has been widely studied for detecting GGIs. MDR reduces the dimensionality of multi-factor by means of binary classification into high-risk (H) or low-risk (L) groups. Unfortunately, this simple binary classification does not reflect the uncertainty of H/L classification. Thus, we proposed Fuzzy MDR to overcome limitations of binary classification by introducing the degree of membership of two fuzzy sets H/L. While Fuzzy MDR demonstrated higher power than that of MDR, its performance is highly dependent on the several tuning parameters. In real applications, it is not easy to choose appropriate tuning parameter values.