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eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2013)

We propose Bayesian models tailored to infer complex patterns of dependence among heterogeneous sets of data.

We consider highly structured information and illustrate modeling of flexible multivariate distributions using the formalism of graphical models.

Motivating applications guiding our methodological developments come

from the field of integrative biology. In particular, we tackle two

fundamental problems: the detection of causal SNPs in pharmacogenetics studies and the assessment of differential patterns of interactions characterizing the activity of biomolecular pathways. We discuss inference based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation and apply our methods to

several synthetic data sets, as well as case study data from cancer genomics.

In these settings, we show how the flexibility of the Bayesian

framework is especially attractive, since it allows for the integration of scientific information by means of prior distributions, while also soundly characterizing the problem of multiple comparisons as a decision problem.

    Cover page: Bayesian Modeling of Interactions in Structured Heterogeneous Data
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UCLA Previously Published Works (2015)
    We consider statistical inference for potentially heterogeneous patterns of association characterizing the expression of bio-molecular pathways across different biologic conditions. We discuss a modeling approach based on Gaussian-directed acyclic graphs and provide computational and methodological details needed for posterior inference. Our application finds motivation in reverse phase protein array data from a study on acute myeloid leukemia, where interest centers on contrasting refractory versus relapsed patients. We illustrate the proposed method through both synthetic and case study data.
      Cover page: Detecting differential patterns of interaction in molecular pathways
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