Mendelian Randomization (MR) is a powerful tool for accessing causality of exposure on an outcome using genetic variants as the instrumental variables. Much of the recent developments is propelled by the increasing availability of GWAS summary data. However, the accuracy of the MR causal effect estimates could be challenged in case of the MR assumptions are violated. The source of biases could attribute to the weak effects arising because of polygenicity, the presentence of horizontal pleiotropy and other biases, e.g., selection bias. In this thesis, we proposed two works, expecting to deal with these issues.In the first part, we proposed a method named 'Bayesian Weighted Mendelian Randomization (BMWR)' for causal inference using summary statistics from GWAS. In BWMR, we not only take into account the uncertainty of weak effects owning to polygenicity of human genomics but also models the weak horizontal pleiotropic effects. Moreover, BWMR adopts a Bayesian reweighting strategy for detection of large pleiotropic outliers. An efficient algorithm based on variational inference was developed to make BWMR computationally efficient and stable. Considering the underestimated variance provided by variational inference, we further derived a closed form variance estimator inspired by a linear response method. We conducted several simulations to evaluate the performance of BWMR, demonstrating the advantage of BWMR over other methods. Then, we applied BWMR to access causality between 126 metabolites and 90 complex traits, revealing novel causal relationships. In the second part, we further developed BWMR-C: Statistical correction of selection bias for Mendelian Randomization based on a Bayesian weighted method. Based on the framework of BWMR, the probability model in BWMR-C is built conditional on the IV selection criteria. In such way, BWMR-C delicated to reduce the influence of the selection process on the causal effect estimates and also preserve the good properties of BWMR. To make the causal inference computationally stable and efficient, we developed a variational EM algorithm. We conducted several comprehensive simulations to evaluate the performance of BWMR-C for correction of selection bias. Then, we applied BWMR-C on seven body fat distribution related traits and 140 UK Biobank traits. Our results show that BWMR-C achieves satisfactory performance for correcting selection bias. Keywords: Mendelian Randomization, polygenicity, horizontal pleiotropy, selection bias, variation inference.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:hkbu.edu.hk/oai:repository.hkbu.edu.hk:etd_oa-1642 |
| Date | 23 August 2019 |
| Creators | Hu, Xianghong |
| Publisher | HKBU Institutional Repository |
| Source Sets | Hong Kong Baptist University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Open Access Theses and Dissertations |
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