Debashree Ray, PhD, MStat
Department of Epidemiology and Department of Biostatistics
Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University
“In this talk, I will discuss a new statistical approach, PLACO, for specifically detecting pleiotropic variants between two traits by considering an underlying composite null hypothesis that a variant is associated with none or only one of the traits. I will show PLACO requires only summary-level data, can maintain type I error at stringent levels, and can achieve major power gain over alternative methods typically used for testing pleiotropy. PLACO allows correlation in summary statistics between studies that may arise due to sharing of controls between disease traits. Finally, I will show an application to type 2 diabetes.”