Figure 2 Simulated association with two causal SNPs. (A) The 100-kbp region around the rs10962894 SNP and simulated statistics at each SNP generated assuming two SNPs are causal. In this example SNP25 and SNP29 are considered as the causal SNPs. However, the most significant SNP is the SNP27. (B) The causal set selected by CAVIAR (our method) and the top k SNPs method. We ranked the selected SNPs based on the association statistics. The gray bars indicate the selected SNPs by both methods, the green bars indicate the selected SNPs by the top k SNPs method only, and the blue bars indicate the selected SNPs by CAVIAR only. The CAVIAR set consists of SNP17, SNP20, SNP21, SNP25, SNP26, SNP28, and SNP29. For the top k SNPs method to capture the two causal SNPs we have to set k to 11, as one of the causal SNPs is ranked 11th based on its significant score. Unfortunately, knowing the value of k beforehand is not possible. Even if the value of k is known, the causal set selected by our method excludes SNP30–SNP35 from the follow-up studies and reduces the cost of follow-up studies by 30% compared to the top k method.
