Method of data generation for affected grandparent-grandchild pairs and its applications

Abstract

With the development of genome-wide association analysis and sequencing techniques, lots of rare and common variants associated with complex traits or diseases have been detected. Besides, in recent years, the research based on family data has attracted wide attention, but most of the research only consider the data of unrelated individuals and siblings, and rarely consider the data of distant relatives like grandparent-grandchild pairs, uncle-nephew pairs, cousin pairs, and so on. In this paper, we propose an effective method for generating affected grandparent-grandchild pair data (called GAGP). Based on association analysis, we use a large number of simulation experiments to evaluate the effectiveness and application of the new sampling method. The simulation results show that in all cases, the new method is valid and obtains good test results compared with other methods, which indicates that the method has better performance. The new method is implemented by the software R.