Researchers at Marquette University have developed MIRAGE, a new Bayesian computational method that addresses the challenges of rare genetic variant association tests. Standing for “mixture-model-based rare-variant analysis on genes,” MIRAGE was found to better account for the heterogeneity of variant effects by focusing on each single variant through Bayesian approach.
Rare genetic variants play a substantial role in conferring disease risk, but not all rare variants are risk variants and identifying which are true risk variants (usually very few ) is challenging. MIRAGE was developed to address this issue of detecting the sparse number of rare risk variants associated with diseases by leveraging their functional annotations.
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