Confirmation of the superior performance of the causal Graphical Analysis Using Genetics (cGAUGE) pipeline in comparison to various competing alternatives

Various methods exist that utilise information from genetic predictors to help identify potential causal relationships between measured biological or clinical traits. Here we conduct computer simulations to investigate the performance of a recently proposed causal Graphical Analysis Using Genetics (cGAUGE) pipeline, used as a precursor to Mendelian randomization analysis, in comparison to our previously proposed Bayesian Network approach for addressing this problem. We use the same simulation (and analysis) code as was used by the developers of cGAUGE, adding in a comparison with the Bayesian Network approach. Overall, we find the optimal method (in terms of giving high power and low false discovery rate) is the cGAUGE pipeline followed by subsequent analysis using the MR-PRESSO Mendelian randomization approach.