Linkage analysis of the simulated data – evaluations and comparisons of methods

The goal of this study is to evaluate, compare, and contrast several standard and new linkage analysis methods. First, we compare a recently proposed confidence set approach with MAPMAKER/SIBS. Then, we evaluate a new Bayesian approach that accounts for heterogeneity. Finally, the newly developed software SIMPLE is compared with GENEHUNTER. We apply these methods to several replicates of the Genetic Analysis Workshop 13 simulated data to assess their ability to detect the high blood pressure genes on chromosome 21, whose positions were known to us prior to the analyses. In contrast to the standard methods, most of the new approaches are able to identify at least one of the disease genes in all the replicates considered.