Mass spectrometry is an important high-throughput technique for profiling small molecular compounds in biological samples and is widely used to identify potential diagnostic and prognostic compounds associated with disease. Commonly, this data generated by mass spectrometry has many missing...

We propose a non-parametric regression methodology, Random Forests on Distance Matrices (RFDM), for detecting genetic variants associated to quantitative phenotypes, obtained using neuroimaging techniques, representing the human brain’s structure or function. RFDM, which is an extension of...

Viruses such as HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV) replicate rapidly and with high transcription error rates, which may facilitate their escape from immune detection through the encoding of mutations at key positions within human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-specific peptides, thus impeding T-cell...

Genetic association studies require that the genotype data from a given person can be correctly linked to the phenotype data from the same person. However, sample misidentification errors sometimes happen, whereby the link becomes invalid for some of the subjects in a study. This can have...

HIV patients are treated by administration of combinations of antiretroviral drugs. The very large number of such combinations makes the manual search for an effective therapy practically impossible, especially in advanced stages of the disease. Therapy selection can be supported by statistical...

Score-based pairwise alignments are widely used in bioinformatics in particular with molecular database search tools, such as the BLAST family. Due to sophisticated heuristics, such algorithms are usually fast but the underlying scoring model unfortunately lacks a statistical description of the...

Recently, expression quantitative loci (eQTL) mapping studies, where expression levels of thousands of genes are viewed as quantitative traits, have been used to provide greater insight into the biology of gene regulation. Originally, eQTLs were detected by applying standard QTL detection tools...

We evaluate power performance to detect the correct mode of inheritance in gene-disease associations of two different approaches: the MAX test and the degree of dominance index or h-index. The MAX test is a special case of the conditional independence tests that simultaneously test for...

The task of analyzing high-dimensional single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data in a case-control design using multivariable techniques has only recently been tackled. While many available approaches investigate only main effects in a high-dimensional setting, we propose a more flexible...

The problem of locating quantitative trait loci (QTL) for experimental populations can be approached by multiple regression analysis. In this context variable selection using a modification of the Bayesian Information Criterion (mBIC) has been well established in the past. In this article a...