==== Front Res Sq ResearchSquare Research Square American Journal Experts 37398263 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2939390/v1 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2939390 preprint 1 Article Tuning Parameters for Polygenic Risk Score Methods Using GWAS Summary Statistics from Training Data http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6120-5278 Jiang Wei 1 Chen Ling 2 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1647-326X Girgenti Matthew J. 3 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1195-9607 Zhao Hongyu 1* 1 Department of Biostatistics, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA. 2 Department of Statistics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. 3 Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA. * Corresponding author(s). hongyu.zhao@yale.edu; 31 5 2023 rs.3.rs-2939390https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. nihpp-rs2939390v1.pdf Predicting genetic risks for common diseases may improve their prevention and early treatment. In recent years, various additive-model-based polygenic risk scores (PRS) methods have been proposed to combine the estimated effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using data collected from genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Some of these methods require access to another external individual-level GWAS dataset to tune the hyperparameters, which can be difficult because of privacy and security-related concerns. Additionally, leaving out partial data for hyperparameter tuning can reduce the predictive accuracy of the constructed PRS model. In this article, we propose a novel method, called PRStuning, to automatically tune hyperparameters for different PRS methods using only GWAS summary statistics from the training data. The core idea is to first predict the performance of the PRS method with different parameter values, and then select the parameters with the best prediction performance. Because directly using the effects observed from the training data tends to overestimate the performance in the testing data (a phenomenon known as overfitting), we adopt an empirical Bayes approach to shrinking the predicted performance in accordance with the estimated genetic architecture of the disease. Results from extensive simulations and real data applications demonstrate that PRStuning can accurately predict the PRS performance across PRS methods and parameters, and it can help select the best-performing parameters. National Institutes of HealthR01 HG012735 R01 GM134005 National Science FoundationDMS1902903 ==== Body pmc1. Introduction The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has led to the discovery of numerous loci associated with most common diseases [1]. These discoveries also provide the opportunity for predicting risks from an individual’s genotypes [2]. Accurate genetic risk prediction can enable us to identify high risk individuals and facilitate disease prevention and early treatment [3]. Polygenic risk score (PRS) is commonly used in genetic risk prediction due to its simplicity and resulting from additive assumption. Both empirical and theoretical studies have shown that the additive component is expected to account for most of the genetic variance of complex traits [4]. Based on this additive assumption, PRS sums the allele dosages of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) weighted by their estimated effect sizes [5]. Various PRS methods have been proposed to estimate the effect sizes of SNPs from a GWAS dataset. Compared to individual-level genotype data, summary statistics are more accessible without security and privacy concerns [6][7]. Many PRS methods proposed recently estimate SNP effects with GWAS summary statistics. One of the simplest is clumping and thresholding (C+T)[8][9][10][11][12][13][14], in which linkage disequilibrium (LD) clumping is applied to the SNPs that pass a p-value threshold. Another related method is pruning and thresholding (P+T), which only includes the SNPs whose p-values exceed a threshold after LD pruning. Both LD clumping and LD pruning are step-wise heuristic procedures that select a set of approximately independent SNPs. Compared to LD pruning, LD clumping selects the independent SNPs after p-value thresholding. Therefore, SNPs showing stronger associations with the disease are preserved, which is preferred in constructing PRS. We note that some literature referred to C+T as P+T, but we treat them as distinct methods in our following discussion. It is important to note that for both C+T and P+T, only a portion of independent SNPs are utilized in constructing the PRS model, while other SNPs and LD information are ignored. To further improve the prediction accuracy of genetic risks, many PRS methods have been proposed to incorporate genome-wide SNPs and their LD information, such as LDpred [15], sBayesR [16], PRS-CS [17] and SDPR [18]. LDpred imposes a point-normal prior for the SNP effect sizes and infers the posterior mean effect sizes using a Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) procedure. To allow more general effect size distributions, sBayesR performs Bayesian posterior inference based on a mixture prior of point and three normal distributions that represent SNPs with zero, small, medium, and large effects respectively. SDPR performs Bayesian posterior inference based on a Dirichlet process modeling effect sizes with a mixture of 1000 normal distributions. To reduce the computational burden from the combination of different components in millions of SNPs, PRS-CS places a continuous shrinkage prior to the SNP effect sizes in a Bayesian framework. All these LD-based methods have demonstrated their superior performance in some datasets of complex diseases. However, none of them has a dominant performance over other methods. Among these PRS methods, P+T, C+T, and LDpred rely on hyperparameters that need to be specified by users beforehand. Although PRS-CS and sBayesR have options to estimate hyperparameters with an additional layer of prior distributions, users can also specify the hyperparameters themselves. For all PRS methods that require tuning hyperparameters, an external individual-level genotype dataset is needed to evaluate different parameter values and choose the best-performing ones. However, as we mentioned before, individual-level genotype data are less accessible than summary statistics. Besides, it is not efficient to leave out a portion of data just for tuning parameters and to estimate SNP effects with the remaining data, leading to information loss and reduced performance for PRS methods. These concerns motivated us to develop a method that can evaluate the performance of a PRS model based on summary statistics used for model training. For diseases with a binary phenotype, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) is the most commonly used criterion in practice for evaluating PRS [5][19][20]. In 2018, Song et al. [21] proposed an estimator of AUC using only summary statistics. This method makes use of an equivalent definition of AUC, i.e. the probability of a PRS from a random case being larger than a PRS from a random control. Based on this definition, AUC can be approximated by a function of the GWAS summary statistics. This method can tune the hyperparameters of a PRS model with summary statistics from another GWAS. To maximize the power of identifying loci associated with common diseases, some large consortia have conducted meta-analyses of all accessible studies and released summary statistics from these meta-analyses. These summary statistics are usually used as training data to optimize the prediction power of PRS models. In this situation, it is difficult to gain access to summary statistics from another independent GWAS. This problem can not be well addressed if we simply plug the summary statistics from the training data into the derived AUC function, because the variants with larger effects tend to have their effect sizes overestimated and these variants have a larger influence on the PRS than the variants exhibiting small effects. This phenomenon is known as overfitting [22]. If we use the observed effects directly, the overfitting would lead to an inflated predicted value of the AUC and the incorrectly selected values of the hyperparameters. Built on Song’s method, we propose PRStuning, a method that requires only summary statistics from the training data to predict the conventional AUC that needs to be evaluated on another individual-level genotype dataset. We incorporate empirical Bayes (EB) theory to shrink the effect sizes of SNPs, which leads to the attenuation of the predicted AUC so as to overcome the overfitting phenomenon [23]. In PRStuning, we adopt a point-normal mixture model as the prior distribution of SNP effects and estimate the parameters in the model with GWAS summary statistics from the training data. There are two settings depending on the dependency across the selected SNPs used for training the PRS model. When the SNPs are independent, e.g., the SNPs used in P+T, we utilize an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the parameters in the prior distribution and calculate the posterior distribution of the AUC based on a closed-form formula. When SNPs are dependent due to LD, we use a Gibbs-sampling-based State-Augmentation for Marginal Estimation (SAME) algorithm [24] to estimate the parameters in the model and obtain the Monte-Carlo (MC) samples of the predicted AUC. Once this is accomplished, we can select the parameter values for the PRS method with the best predicted AUC. We applied PRStuning to GWAS datasets of three common diseases, including coronary artery disease (CAD), type 2 diabetes (T2D), and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with three PRS methods, namely P+T,C+T, and LDPred. Results from extensive simulations and real data applications demonstrate that PRStuning can accurately predict the PRS performance across PRS methods and parameters, and it can help with parameter selections. 2 Results 2.1 Overview of PRStuning Define gi,m∈{0,1,2} as the genotype score of SNP m for individual i. A PRS for individual i is the sum of the genotypes gi=gi,1,…,gi,M weighted by the corresponding effects ω=ω1,…,ωM, i.e., (1) PRSi=∑m=1Mωmgi,m. Here M is the total number of pre-selected SNPs used for constructing PRS. Please note that not all SNPs collected in the training GWAS data are necessarily used in PRS calculation. Some PRS methods incorporate SNP selection steps based on the associations of the SNPs with the disease. Here we define the pre-selected SNPs as the SNPs used in building the PRS model before running any selection step. For example, the pre-selected SNPs in C+T are actually genome-wide SNPs collected in the training GWAS data and the LD clumping procedure used in C+T is a selection step based on the observed association strength. In contrast, LD pruning is a selection step unrelated to SNP associations with the disease. Therefore, the pre-selected SNPs in P+T are the SNPs selected after an LD pruning step. Different PRS methods have been proposed to estimate the weight vector ω from a GWAS dataset or its summary statistics for the disease of interest. Here and after we regard ω as the inferred values from the PRS method of interest. Based on the definition of AUC and the distribution of PRS, Song [21] formulated AUC as (2) AUC=ΦΔ, Where (3) Δ:=2∑m=1Mωmδmτ02+τ12andτj2=∑m=1Mωm2sj,m2+2∑m1