Genotype-phenotype association study via new multi-task learning model

Research on the associations between genetic variations and imaging phenotypes is developing with the advance in high-throughput genotype and brain image techniques. Regression analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and imaging measures as quantitative traits (QTs) has been proposed to identify the quantitative trait loci (QTL) via multi-task learning models. Recent studies consider the interlinked structures within SNPs and imaging QTs through group lasso, e.g. ℓ(2,1)-norm, leading to better predictive results and insights of SNPs. However, group sparsity is not enough for representing the correlation between multiple tasks and ℓ(2,1)-norm regularization is not robust either. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task learning model to analyze the associations between SNPs and QTs. We suppose that low-rank structure is also beneficial to uncover the correlation between genetic variations and imaging phenotypes. Finally, we conduct regression analysis of SNPs and QTs. Experimental results show that our model is more accurate in prediction than compared methods and presents new insights of SNPs.