A Comparison of Five Methods for Selecting Tagging Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms

Our goal was to compare methods for tagging single-nucleotide polymorphisms (tagSNPs) withrespect to the power to detect disease association under differing haplotype-disease associationmodels. We were also interested in the effect that SNP selection samples, consisting of eithercases, controls, or a mixture, would have on power. We investigated five previously describedalgorithms for choosing tagSNPS: two that picked SNPs based on haplotype structure (Chapmanhaplotypicand Stram), two that picked SNPs based on pair-wise allelic association (Chapman-allelicand Cousin), and one control method that chose equally spaced SNPs (Zhai). In two diseaseassociatedregions from the Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 simulated data, we tested theassociation between tagSNP genotype and disease over the tagSNP sets chosen by each methodfor each sampling scheme. This was repeated for 100 replicates to estimate power. The two allelicmethods chose essentially all SNPs in the region and had nearly optimal power. The two haplotypicmethods chose about half as many SNPs. The haplotypic methods had poor performance comparedto the allelic methods in both regions. We expected an improvement in power when the selectionsample contained cases; however, there was only moderate variation in power between thesampling approaches for each method. Finally, when compared to the haplotypic methods, thereference method performed as well or worse in the region with ancestral disease haplotypestructure.