Gene-level Association

GWANN (Genome-Wide Association Neural Networks) is a novel approach that uses neural networks to perform gene-level association studies. Applied to Alzheimer's disease in UK Biobank, GWANN identifies genes linked to family history of AD by aggregating SNP-level information at the gene level through neural network architectures. Published in Briefings in Bioinformatics.

Augmenting traditional genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with advanced machine learning algorithms can allow the detection of novel signals in available cohorts. We introduce "genome-wide association neural networks (GWANN)", a novel approach that uses neural networks (NNs) to perform a gene-level association study with family history of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in UK Biobank.