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BayesSUR: An R Package for High-Dimensional Multivariate Bayesian Variable and Covariance Selection in Linear Regression

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Authors

Zhao, Zhi 
Banterle, Marco 
Lewin, Alex 

Abstract

In molecular biology, advances in high-throughput technologies have made it possible to study complex multivariate phenotypes and their simultaneous associations with high-dimensional genomic and other omics data, a problem that can be studied with high-dimensional multi-response regression, where the response variables are potentially highly correlated. To this purpose, we recently introduced several multivariate Bayesian variable and covariance selection models, e.g., Bayesian estimation methods for sparse seemingly unrelated regression for variable and covariance selection. Several variable selection priors have been implemented in this context, in particular, the hotspot detection prior for latent variable inclusion indicators, which results in sparse variable selection for associations between predictors and multiple phenotypes. We also propose an alternative, which uses a Markov random field (MRF) prior for incorporating prior knowledge about the dependence structure of the inclusion indicators. Inference of Bayesian seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) by Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is made computationally feasible by factorisation of the covariance matrix amongst the response variables. In this paper, we present BayesSUR, an R package, which allows the user to easily specify and run a range of different Bayesian SUR models, which have been implemented in C++ for computational efficiency. The R package allows the specification of the models in a modular way, where the user chooses the priors for variable selection and for covariance selection separately. We demonstrate the performance of sparse SUR models with the hotspot prior and spike-and-slab MRF prior on synthetic and real data sets representing eQTL or mQTL studies and in vitro anti-cancer drug screening studies as examples for typical applications.

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Keywords

seemingly unrelated regression, Bayesian multivariate regression, structured co-variance matrix, Markov random field prior, multi-omics data

Journal Title

JOURNAL OF STATISTICAL SOFTWARE

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1548-7660
1548-7660

Volume Title

Publisher

Foundation for Open Access Statistic
Sponsorship
Alan Turing Institute (BCDSA/100038)
Alan Turing Institute (Unknown)