A novel and robust feature selection method with FDR control for omics-wide association analysis

Omics-wide association analysis is a very important tool for medicine and human health study. However, the modern omics data sets collected often exhibit the high-dimensionality, unknown distribution response, unknown distribution features and unknown complex association relationships between the response and its explanatory features. Reliable association analysis results depend on an accurate modeling for such data sets. Most of the existing association analysis methods rely on the specific model assumptions and lack effective false discovery rate (FDR) control. To address these limitations, the paper firstly applies a single index model for omics data. The model shows robust performance in allowing the relationships between the response variable and linear combination of covariates to be connected by any unknown monotonic link function, and both the random error and the covariates can follow any unknown distribution. Then based on this model, the paper combines rank-based approach and symmetrized data aggregation approach to develop a novel and robust feature selection method for achieving fine-mapping of risk features while controlling the false positive rate of selection. The theoretical results support the proposed method and the analysis results of simulated data show the new method possesses effective and robust performance for all the scenarios. The new method is also used to analyze the two real datasets and identifies some risk features unreported by the existing finds.