Menu:

My long term research goal is to change the way scientists analyze high dimensional biomedical data for the goal of scientific discovery. The rate of change in technology that advances our ability to collect observations about genomic data, including DNA, single cells, and tissue samples, rapidly makes analytic methods for these observations obsolete. Furthermore, the complexity of the biological phenomena we attempt to quantify and understand overwhelms current methods that oversimplify the complexity in order to scale to the data magnitude. General approaches to data analysis, including principal component analysis and linear regression, are insufficient for the intricacy of modern biomedical data; new approaches using statistical models and machine learning methods that include analysis- and technology-specific structure must be developed for many types of genomic studies.

My group builds and applies structured hierarchical models and approximate methods for the analysis of high-dimensional genomic data. Our work in developing methods for modern genomic technologies and scientific questions requires three types of innovations. First, statistical models need to be adapted to capture the complexity of the data. Second, inference algorithms for these structured models need to scale to the size of the data. Third, software infrastructure must be usable by the biomedical community. The impact of addressing these issues is that the pace of discovery and actionable results from biomedical research is accelerated, because the analytic solutions from advanced platforms are broadly available and immediately applicable. The development of these frameworks is specific to technology and analytic goals, and is not easily generalized. To this end, our work has broadly focused on innovations in two types of statistical analyses: structured regression models for hypothesis testing, and hierarchical latent variable models for dimension reduction and exploratory data analysis, as detailed below.

To this end, my work has broadly focused on innovations in two types of statistical analyses: structured regression models for hypothesis testing, and hierarchical latent variable models for dimension reduction and exploratory data analysis. Along with the development of these frameworks comes adaptations of inference methods for robust and tractable posterior inference in these models by using ideas from machine learning, and validation of the latent structure and hypothesis testing using experimental validation.

Multiple hypothesis testing frameworks for quantitative genetics

The field of quantitative genetics aims to understand the genetic basis of complex traits including human disease; in order to accomplish this aim, statistical tests must be developed to identify associations in studies with limited sample sizes between genotypes and quantitative or binary traits. These studies often include many traits and whole genomes, pushing the number of statistical tests into the trillions and requiring reformulation of the corrections for multiple hypothesis testing methods. Moreover, studies of complex traits include technical and biological confounders, such as batch effects, population structure among the samples, or variance due to age, sex, or body mass index.


Statistical tests for functional genomics.

High dimensional GWAS. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identify genetic variants that are associated with the occurrence of a complex phenotype or disease in a set of individuals. Many phenotypes are difficult to quantify with a single measure. I am building methods for conducting GWAS using survey data as the phenotype. Standard dimensionality reduction techniques are not effective for scaling down the size of the data because the resulting phenotype summaries were not interpretable.

some text
Bayesian tests for association. We are developing models for Bayesian tests of association between multiple genotypes and a phenotype that take into account local structure on SNPs to improve statistical power of associations. We are extending these ideas to methods that produce better estimates of effect size, are faster, and can handle binary traits.
Publications: [Engelhardt & Adams 2014]


Sparse latent factor models for recovering latent structure in genomic data


Studying the mechanistic underpinnings of functional SNPs

In order for SNPs associated with complex traits and disease to be medically actionable, it is essential that we understand how they work.



Electronic medical record and hospital inpatient data


Epigenome-wide association studies

We are currently developing methods for performing epigenome-wide scans for association of methylation status with phenotypes of interest. Current developments involve developing and applying methods for causal inference to unravel the relationships between epigenetic effects.

Publications: [Zhang et al. 2015]

some text



Protein molecular function prediction

As a graduate student with Dr. Michael Jordan, collaborating with Dr. Steven Brenner, I created a statistical methodology, SIFTER (Statistical Inference of Function Through Evolutionary Relationships), to capture how protein molecular function evolves within a phylogeny in order to accurately predict function for unannotated proteins, improving over existing methods that use pairwise sequence comparisons. We relied on the assumption that function evolves in parallel with sequence evolution, implying that phylogenetic distance is the natural measure of functional divergence. In SIFTER, molecular function evolves as a first-order Markov chain within a phylogenetic tree. Posterior probabilities are computed exactly using message-passing, with an approximate method for large or functionally diverse protein families; model parameters are estimated using generalized expectation maximization. Functional predictions are extracted from protein-specific posterior probabilities for each function. I applied SIFTER to a genome-scale fungal data set, which included families of proteins from 46 fully-sequenced fungal genomes, and SIFTER substantially outperformed state-of-the-art methods in producing correct and specific predictions.

Publications: [Engelhardt et al., 2006], [Engelhardt et al., 2007], [Engelhardt et al., 2011]