FINEMAP: efficient variable selection using summary data from genome-wide association studies

Abstract

Motivation : The goal of fine-mapping in genomic regions associated with complex diseases and traits is to identify causal variants that point to molecular mechanisms behind the associations. Recent fine-mapping methods using summary data from genome-wide association studies rely on exhaustive search through all possible causal configurations, which is computationally expensive. Results : We introduce FINEMAP, a software package to efficiently explore a set of the most important causal configurations of the region via a shotgun stochastic search algorithm. We show that FINEMAP produces accurate results in a fraction of processing time of existing approaches and is therefore a promising tool for analyzing growing amounts of data produced in genome-wide association studies and emerging sequencing projects. Availability and implementation : FINEMAP v1.0 is freely available for Mac OS X and Linux at http://www.christianbenner.com . Contact : christian.benner@helsinki.fi or matti.pirinen@helsinki.fi