Fast and Robust Association Testing for High-Throughput Testing

• Activity Number: 349
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Fred Wright*+ and Yihui Zhou
• Companies: The University of North Carolina and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• Keywords: permutation ; high dimensional testing ; moment matching

Abstract

Permutation is an attractive approach to assess association between two vectors x and y, by comparing the observed statistic to the distribution induced by random permutation of one of the vectors. For a number of "standard" statistics, equivalent testing can be performed by using the sample Pearson correlation. Applications include the standard tests applied in the two-sample problem, simple linear regression, several generalized linear models, linear categorical trend tests, and rank-based association. We describe a simple approximation to the distribution of the correlation under permutation, providing accurate p-values that can be quickly computed for a variety of data types. The approximation may be especially useful in high-throughput applications in which a series of x-vectors is compared to one or more y-vectors.