A Two-Graph Guided Multi-task Lasso Approach for eQTL Mapping

Abstract

Learning a small number of genetic variants associated with multiple complex genetic traits is of practical importance and remains challenging due to the highdimensional nature of data. In this paper, we proposed a two-graph guided multi-task Lasso to address this issue with an emphasis on estimating subnetwork-to-subnetwork associations in expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) mapping. The proposed model can learn such subnetworkto-subnetwork associations and therefore can be seen as a generalization of several state-of-the-art multi-task feature selection methods. Additionally, this model has a nice property of allowing flexible structured sparsity on both feature and label domains. Simulation study shows the improved performance of our model and a human eQTL data set is analyzed to further demonstrate the applications of the model. 1