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| 2007 Honor a Statistician Award |
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The Connecticut Chapter is recognizing
Chapter members who have
made significant contributions to statistics and its applications with the Honor A Statistician
Award. Involvement in Chapter activities is also considered. This year we were pleased to present Heping Zhang
with the award.
Heping was presented with the award at the
Chapter Banquet in June 2007.
The abstract for Hepings talk is presented below:
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| Genetic Analysis of Ordinal Traits |
For complex diseases, especially mental health
conditions including nicotine dependence and substance
use, the outcome variables are often recorded in an
ordinal rather than quantitative scale. The naturally
recorded ordinal traits are usually analyzed either as
quantitative traits or being dichotomized. It has been
demonstrated repeatedly in recent studies that this
commonly used approach to dealing with ordinal traits is
inadequate and results in loss of power. After
discussing general principles and an overview of related
work, I will present score test statistics that belong
to a general class of family-based association tests (FBATs)
for ordinal traits. This new approach can adjust for the
effects of covariates. Simulation results will be
presented to compare the type I error and power of our
proposed tests with existing tests. The empirical result
suggests that our test produces reasonable type I errors
and has better power than the existing tests. The
proposed test was used to analyze GAW14 data on
alcoholism and identified several single nucleotide
polymorphisms including rs485874, rs619, rs718251,
rs1869907 that are significantly associated with alcohol
dependence after adjusting for gender and age.
This is a joint work with Rui Feng, Xueqin Wang, Hongtu
Zhu and Yuanqing Ye.
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