OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Epigenome-wide association studies are often performed using heterogeneous methylation samples, especially when there is no prior information as to which cell-types are disease associated. While much work has been done on estimating cell-type fractions and removing cell-type heterogeneity variation, relatively little work has been done on identifying cell-type specific variation in heterogeneous samples. In this talk I present a Bayesian model-based approach for making cell-type specific inferences in heterogeneous settings, by utilising a logistic transform to properly constrain parameters, and incorporating a prior knowledge of cell-type lineage via prior covariance structure. The approach was applied to the determination of sex-specific cell-type effects in methylation, where cell-type information was present as an independent verification of the results. The approach showed significant improvement in performance over previously used methods, particularly for detecting association in several rare cell-types. I outline current and future work on this problem, which leverages the flexibility of the Bayesian modelling approach by incorporating local methylation correlation and multiple data-types.