Mendelian Randomization with Instrumental Variable Synthesis (IVY) [article]

Zhaobin Kuang, Aldo Córdova-Palomera, Frederic Sala, Sen Wu, Jared Dunnmon, Christopher Ré, James R Priest
2019 bioRxiv   pre-print
Mendelian Randomization (MR) is an important causal inference method primarily used in biomedical research. This work applies contemporary techniques in machine learning to improve the robustness and power of traditional MR tools. By denoising and combining candidate genetic variants through techniques from unsupervised probabilistic graphical models, an influential latent instrumental variable is constructed for causal effect estimation. We present results on identifying relationships between
more » ... iomarkers and the occurrence of coronary artery disease using individual-level real-world data from UK-BioBank via the proposed method. The approach, termed Instrumental Variable sYnthesis (IVY) is proposed as a complement to current methods, and is able to improve results based on allele scoring, particularly at moderate sample sizes.
doi:10.1101/657775 fatcat:6ghdv6zo7zashc2ioi2o47vav4