Chunk #32 — Statistical Methodology for the Analysis of Association Trajectories — Identification of significant SNPs — Significant SNPs identified by thresholding p-values by false discovery rate
The evaluation of the significance of the association of the individual SNPs with theta EROs is determined by the selection of individual p-values based on control of the false discovery rate. Given the fact that this is a candidate gene study, in which at least a small proportion of the tested variables are expected to be significant, the control of the false discovery rate by the characteristics of data is appropriate. The method used to determine the false discovery rate for any particular level of p-value must be capable of dealing with correlated data, as p-values are correlated as a result of both the non-parametric regression method and the phenotypic correlations described in Chorlian et al. (2015). The method used is derived from that in Storey and Tibshirani (2003), which uses the distribution of the calculated p-values to determine the prevalence of results which reflect the absence of association, and correspondingly, the prevalence of results which reflect the presence of association.
