A New Epistasis Detecting Algorithm Based on Ant Colony Optimization

The rapid developments of chip-based technology have greatly improved human genetics and made routine the access of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) contributing to an informatics challenge. The characterization and interpretation of genes and gene-gene interactions that affect the susceptibility of common, complex multifactorial diseases is a computational and statistical challenge in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Various methods have been proposed, but they have difficulty to be directly applied to GWAS caused by excessive search space and intensive computational burden. In this paper, we propose an ant colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm by combining the pheromone updating rule with the heuristic information. We tested power performance of our algorithm by conducting sufficient experiments including a wide range of simulated datasets experiments and a real genome-wide dataset experiment. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is time efficient and gain good performance in the term of the power of prediction accuracy.