Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

Statistical methods for leveraging longitudinal data in genetic epidemiology research

Peng Wei, PhD

Assoicate Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Human Genetics Center, The University of Texas School of Public Health

Many prospective cohort studies and electronic health record (EHR)-based cohorts have collected longitudinal exposure and phenotype information; however, the mainstream genetic epidemiology research has thus far largely ignored the rich longitudinal information and simply used the baseline measurements to identify genotype-phenotype associations. In this talk I will introduce some new statistical method developments in my group to exploit the longitudinal phenotypes and/or exposures. I will demonstrate the new methods’ power gains using simulations and several case studies, including (1) identifying gene-by-longitudinal exposure interactions influencing disease risk, (2) Mendelian randomization analysis with a time-varying exposure, and (3) rare-variant association tests for longitudinal phenotypes.