Comparison of artificial neural network analysis with other multimarker methods for detecting genetic association
crackpot submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.biomedcentral.com)
"Although ANN analysis was more powerful than the standard haplotype-based test it is unlikely to be taken up widely. The permutation testing necessary to obtain a valid p value makes it slow to perform and it is not underpinned by a theoretical model relating marker genotypes to disease phenotype. Nevertheless, the superior performance of this method does imply that the widely-used haplotype-based methods for detecting association with multiple markers are not optimal and efforts could be made to improve upon them. The fact that the t statistic obtained from ANN analysis is highly correlated with the statistical significance does suggest a possibility to use ANN analysis in situations where large numbers of markers have been genotyped, since the t value could be used as a proxy for the p value in preliminary analyses. "