Abstract
DNA methylation can be transmitted through generations. This paper proposes a clustering method to identify the intergenerational patterns from parents to their offspring. Motivated by the potential of correlation between DNA methylation sites, we use the multivariate generalized beta distribution to model the blockwise correlation structure among the sites. A stochastic EM algorithm is implemented to estimate the parameters, and BIC is applied to determine the optimal number of clusters. Simulations demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. We further applied the approach to cluster DNA methylation data generated from a cohort study on asthma and allergic conditions.
Funding Statement
The work is supported by National Institutes of Health (R01 AI121226 and R01 AI091905).
Acknowledgments
We are thankful to the High Performance Computing facility at the University of Memphis. We also thank the Editor, Associate Editor, and four anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions that greatly improved this paper.
To whom correspondence should be addressed: hzhang6@memphis.edu.
Citation
Xichen Mou. Hongmei Zhang. S. Hasan Arshad. "Identifying intergenerational patterns of correlated methylation sites." Ann. Appl. Stat. 16 (1) 521 - 536, March 2022. https://doi.org/10.1214/21-AOAS1511
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