Estimating heritability of survival traits using censored multiple variance component model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kim, Do Hyun, Zhou, Hua, Chau, Brendon, Jensen, Aubrey, Shen, Judong, Mehrotra, Devan, Li, Gang, Zhou, Jin J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kim, Do Hyun
Zhou, Hua
Chau, Brendon
Jensen, Aubrey
Shen, Judong
Mehrotra, Devan
Li, Gang
Zhou, Jin J.
author_facet Kim, Do Hyun
Zhou, Hua
Chau, Brendon
Jensen, Aubrey
Shen, Judong
Mehrotra, Devan
Li, Gang
Zhou, Jin J.
contents Characterizing the genetic basis of survival traits, such as age at disease onset, is critical for risk stratification, early intervention, and elucidating biological mechanisms that can inform therapeutic development. However, time-to-event outcomes in human cohorts are frequently right-censored, complicating both the estimation and partitioning of total heritability. Modern biobanks linked to electronic health records offer the unprecedented power to dissect the genetic basis of age-at-diagnosis traits at large scale. Yet, few methods exist for estimating and partitioning the total heritability of censored survival traits. Existing methods impose restrictive distributional assumptions on genetic and environmental effects and are not scalable to large biobanks with a million subjects. We introduce a censored multiple variance component model to robustly estimate the total heritability of survival traits under right-censoring. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that the method provides accurate total heritability estimates of right-censored traits at censoring rates up to 80% given sufficient sample size. The method is computationally efficient in estimating one hundred genetic variance components of a survival trait using large-scale biobank genotype data consisting of a million subjects and a million SNPs in under nine hours, including uncertainty quantification. We apply our method to estimate the total heritability of four age-at-diagnosis traits from the UK Biobank study. Our results establish a scalable and robust framework for heritability analysis of right-censored survival traits in large-scale genetic studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_26226
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating heritability of survival traits using censored multiple variance component model
Kim, Do Hyun
Zhou, Hua
Chau, Brendon
Jensen, Aubrey
Shen, Judong
Mehrotra, Devan
Li, Gang
Zhou, Jin J.
Methodology
Characterizing the genetic basis of survival traits, such as age at disease onset, is critical for risk stratification, early intervention, and elucidating biological mechanisms that can inform therapeutic development. However, time-to-event outcomes in human cohorts are frequently right-censored, complicating both the estimation and partitioning of total heritability. Modern biobanks linked to electronic health records offer the unprecedented power to dissect the genetic basis of age-at-diagnosis traits at large scale. Yet, few methods exist for estimating and partitioning the total heritability of censored survival traits. Existing methods impose restrictive distributional assumptions on genetic and environmental effects and are not scalable to large biobanks with a million subjects. We introduce a censored multiple variance component model to robustly estimate the total heritability of survival traits under right-censoring. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that the method provides accurate total heritability estimates of right-censored traits at censoring rates up to 80% given sufficient sample size. The method is computationally efficient in estimating one hundred genetic variance components of a survival trait using large-scale biobank genotype data consisting of a million subjects and a million SNPs in under nine hours, including uncertainty quantification. We apply our method to estimate the total heritability of four age-at-diagnosis traits from the UK Biobank study. Our results establish a scalable and robust framework for heritability analysis of right-censored survival traits in large-scale genetic studies.
title Estimating heritability of survival traits using censored multiple variance component model
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26226