Evaluation of random forests performance for genome-wide association studies in the presence of interaction effects

Random forests (RF) is one of a broad class of machine learning methods that are able to deal with large-scale data without model specification, which makes it an attractive method for genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The performance of RF and other association methods in the presence of interactions was evaluated using the simulated data from Genetic Analysis Workshop 16 Problem 3, with knowledge of the major causative markers, risk factors, and their interactions in the simulated traits. There was good power to detect the environmental risk factors using RF, trend tests, or regression analyses but the power to detect the effects of the causal markers was poor for all methods. The causal marker that had an interactive effect with smoking did show moderate evidence of association in the RF and regression analyses, suggesting that RF may perform well at detecting such interactions in larger, more highly powered datasets.