A Generalized Kruskal-Wallis Test Incorporating Group Uncertainty with Application to Genetic Association Studies

作者：Acar Elif F^*; Sun Lei

来源：Biometrics, 2013, 69(2): 427-435.

DOI：10.1111/biom.12006

• Genome-wide association studies
• Imputation
• k-sample problem
• Nonparametric test
• Probabilistic data
• Ranks

Motivated by genetic association studies of SNPs with genotype uncertainty, we propose a generalization of the Kruskal-Wallis test that incorporates group uncertainty when comparing k samples. The extended test statistic is based on probability-weighted rank-sums and follows an asymptotic chi-square distribution with k - 1 degrees of freedom under the null hypothesis. Simulation studies confirm the validity and robustness of the proposed test in finite samples. Application to a genome-wide association study of type 1 diabetic complications further demonstrates the utilities of this generalized Kruskal-Wallis test for studies with group uncertainty. The method has been implemented as an open-resource R program, GKW.

• 出版日期2013-6