Exploration and comparison of methods for combining population- and family-based genetic association using the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 mini-exome

We examine the performance of various methods for combining family- and population-based genetic association data. Several approaches have been proposed for situations in which information is collected from both a subset of unrelated subjects and a subset of family members. Analyzing these samples separately is known to be inefficient, and it is important to determine the scenarios for which differing methods perform well. Others have investigated this question; however, no extensive simulations have been conducted, nor have these methods been applied to mini-exome-style data such as that provided by Genetic Analysis Workshop 17. We quantify the empirical power and false-positive rates for three existing methods applied to the Genetic Analysis Workshop 17 mini-exome data and compare relative performance. We use knowledge of the underlying data simulation model to make these assessments.