The R package can be installed from CRAN
install.packages("ACEt")
The installation requires Rcpp-0.11.1 and has been tested on R-4.1.3. The installation of the ACEt package also requires installing the BH and RcppArmadillo packages.
Please contact hyx520101@gmail.com for more information.
To install the latest version from github:
install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("lhe17/ACEt")
We illustrate how to utilize the ACEt R package with an example dataset that can be loaded with the following codes. More detail about the method is given in He et al. (2016) and He et al. (2017).
library(ACEt)
data(data_ace)
The example dataset contains two matrices mz
and
dz
for MZ and DZ twins, respectively. Each matrix includes
2500 twin pairs, of which the first two columns are the quantitative
phenotype of the twin pair and the third column (T_m
or
T_d
) is age.
attributes(data_ace)
#> $names
#> [1] "mz" "dz"
head(data_ace$mz)
#> T_m
#> [1,] 2.5638027 4.7355457 1
#> [2,] -3.1959902 -3.0133873 1
#> [3,] 1.3924694 2.8656795 1
#> [4,] 2.4519483 1.9145994 1
#> [5,] -0.4186678 1.3470608 1
#> [6,] -1.2805044 -0.5234272 1
head(data_ace$dz)
#> T_d
#> [1,] 0.1402850 -0.3430456 1
#> [2,] 0.8588600 -0.7381698 1
#> [3,] 0.4025476 0.2794685 1
#> [4,] -0.4564107 0.2008932 1
#> [5,] -0.2458682 -3.0600677 1
#> [6,] 0.1459282 0.4588418 1
The age is distributed uniformly from 1 to 50 in both twin datasets
and the phenotypes are normally distributed with a mean equal to zero.
As discussed in He et al. (2017), before
used as an input for this package, the phenotype should be centered, for
example, by using residuals from a linear regression model
lm()
in which covariates for the mean function can be
included. Fitting an ACE(t) model can be done by calling the
AtCtEt
function, in which users can specify a function
(null, constant or splines) for each of the A, C, and E components
independently through the mod
argument.
# fitting the ACE(t) model
re <- AtCtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('d','d','c'), knot_a = 6, knot_c = 4)
summary(re)
#> Length Class Mode
#> n_beta_a 1 -none- numeric
#> n_beta_c 1 -none- numeric
#> n_beta_e 1 -none- numeric
#> beta_a 7 -none- numeric
#> beta_c 5 -none- numeric
#> beta_e 1 -none- numeric
#> hessian_ap 169 -none- numeric
#> hessian 169 -none- numeric
#> con 1 -none- numeric
#> lik 1 -none- numeric
#> knots_a 10 -none- numeric
#> knots_c 8 -none- numeric
#> knots_e 2 -none- numeric
#> min_t 1 -none- numeric
#> max_t 1 -none- numeric
#> boot 0 -none- NULL
In the above script, an ACE(t) model is fitted for the example
dataset. The first two arguments specify the matrices of the phenotypes
for MZ and DZ twins, respectively. The argument
mod = c('d','d','c')
specifies that we allow the variances
of the A and C components to change dynamically and assume the variance
of the E component to be a constant over age. The mod
argument is a vector of three elements corresponding to the A, C and E
components that can be 'd', 'c' or 'n'
, in which
'n'
represents the exclusion of a component. For example,
mod = c('d','n','c')
indicates that we fit an AE model with
a dynamic A component and a constant E component. It should be noted
that the E component cannot be eliminated. We can also give the number
of knots for each component, which is ignored if we choose
'c'
or 'n'
for that component. The number of
randomly generated initial values for the estimation algorithm can be
specified using the robust
argument. Multiple initial
values can be attempted to minimize the risk of missing the global
maximum. The AtCtEt
function returns both an expected and
an approximate observed Fisher information matrices (shown below), which
are close to each other in general and can be used to compute pointwise
CIs. Note that the expected information matrix is always positive
(semi)definite, but the approximated one is not necessarily positive
definite. The returned value lik
is the negative
log-likelihood that can be used for LRT for the comparison of twin
models.
# part of the expected information matrix
re$hessian[1:8,1:8]
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
#> [1,] 3.3122436 8.572181 0.9774334 0.00000000 0.000000 0.000000
#> [2,] 8.5721808 64.560338 43.2299744 2.22206265 0.000000 0.000000
#> [3,] 0.9774334 43.229974 145.2021892 67.94632724 2.836022 0.000000
#> [4,] 0.0000000 2.222063 67.9463272 182.31265682 68.569776 2.334633
#> [5,] 0.0000000 0.000000 2.8360218 68.56977584 155.634291 54.989838
#> [6,] 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 2.33463321 54.989838 113.226897
#> [7,] 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.00000000 1.840752 22.878770
#> [8,] 4.9109578 13.518421 2.7632296 0.02669836 0.000000 0.000000
#> [,7] [,8]
#> [1,] 0.000000 4.91095781
#> [2,] 0.000000 13.51842124
#> [3,] 0.000000 2.76322956
#> [4,] 0.000000 0.02669836
#> [5,] 1.840752 0.00000000
#> [6,] 22.878770 0.00000000
#> [7,] 11.077766 0.00000000
#> [8,] 0.000000 11.02095804
# part the observed information matrix approximated by the L-BFGS algorithm
re$hessian_ap[1:8,1:8]
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6]
#> [1,] 3.3066880 8.583804 0.9771341 0.00000000 0.000000 0.000000
#> [2,] 8.5838039 64.611733 43.1402778 2.22883073 0.000000 0.000000
#> [3,] 0.9771341 43.140278 144.8342062 67.91347006 2.836111 0.000000
#> [4,] 0.0000000 2.228831 67.9134701 181.14525247 67.405340 2.312405
#> [5,] 0.0000000 0.000000 2.8361108 67.40534018 155.154944 55.376537
#> [6,] 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 2.31240520 55.376537 114.366468
#> [7,] 0.0000000 0.000000 0.0000000 0.00000000 1.856622 23.555961
#> [8,] 5.0462737 13.315584 2.7042919 0.02561431 0.000000 0.000000
#> [,7] [,8]
#> [1,] 0.000000 5.04627369
#> [2,] 0.000000 13.31558433
#> [3,] 0.000000 2.70429192
#> [4,] 0.000000 0.02561431
#> [5,] 1.856622 0.00000000
#> [6,] 23.555961 0.00000000
#> [7,] 11.486909 0.00000000
#> [8,] 0.000000 11.08078500
The AtCtEt
function returns the minus log-likelihood
evaluated at the estimates that is needed to make inference based on
LRT. For example, the following program tests whether the A or C
component has a constant variance with respect to age, we fit the null
models and calculate the p-values based on \(\chi^2\) distributions. It can be seen that
the LRT has no sufficient statistical power to reject the constancy of
the C component with this sample size (p1>0.05
). In
addition, we test whether the C component can be ignored by comparing
re_cc
and re_cn
and compute the p-value
(p3
) based on a mixture of \(\chi^2\) distributions.
re_cc <- AtCtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('d','c','c'), knot_a = 6, knot_c = 4)
p1 <- pchisq(2*(re_cc$lik-re$lik), 4, lower.tail=FALSE)
p1
#> [1] 0.2079343
re_ac <- AtCtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('c','d','c'), knot_a = 6, knot_c = 4)
p2 <- pchisq(2*(re_ac$lik-re$lik), 6, lower.tail=FALSE)
p2
#> [1] 8.937498e-12
re_cn <- AtCtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('d','n','c'), knot_a = 6, knot_c = 4)
p3 <- 0.5*pchisq(2*(re_cn$lik-re_cc$lik), 1, lower.tail=FALSE)
p3
#> [1] 2.155026e-08
After fitting the ACE(t) model, we can plot the estimated variance
curves by calling the plot_acet
function.
plot_acet(re, ylab='Var', xlab='Age (1-50)')
By default, the 95% pointwise CIs are estimated using the delta
method. Alternatively, we can choose the bootstrap method by setting
boot=TRUE
and giving the number of bootstrap resampling,
the default value of which is 100.
## fitting an ACE(t) model with the CIs esitmated by the bootstrap method
re_b <- AtCtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('d','d','c'), knot_a = 6, knot_c = 4, boot = TRUE,
num_b = 60)
plot_acet(re_b, boot = TRUE)
Next, we plot the age-specific heritability by setting the argument
heri=TRUE
in the plot_acet
function. And
similarly we can choose either the delta method or the bootstrap method
to generate the CIs.
## plot dynamic heritability with the CIs using the delta method
plot_acet(re_b, heri=TRUE, boot = FALSE)
## plot dynamic heritability with the CIs using the bootstrap method
plot_acet(re_b, heri=TRUE, boot = TRUE)
An ADE(t) model can be fitted and plotted similarly using the
AtDtEt
function as shown below.
## fitting an ADE(t) model with the CIs esitmated by the bootstrap method
re_b <- AtDtEt(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, mod = c('d','d','c'), boot = TRUE, num_b = 60)
plot_acet(re_b, boot = TRUE)
An ACE(t)-p model is a more stable model, which reduces the
sensitivity to the number of knots by using P-splines. The ACE(t)-p
model is implemented in the AtCtEtp
function, in which
users can choose exponential of penalized splines, a linear function or
a constant to model a certain component by setting the mod
argument. Compared to the ACE(t) model, it is not an essential problem
to provide an excessive number of knots (the default value of interior
knots is 8) when using the ACE(t)-p model as it is more important to
ensure adequate knots for curves with more fluctuation than to avoid
overfitting. Below, we fit the example dataset using the
AtCtEtp
function in which the A and C components are
modelled by B-splines of 8 interior knots and the E component by a
log-linear function. Similar to the AtCtEt
function, we can
use the robust
argument to specify the number of randomly
generated initial values, which can reduce the program’s possibility of
being stuck on a local maximum in the EM algorithm.
## fitting an ACE(t)-p model
re <- AtCtEtp(data_ace$mz, data_ace$dz, knot_a = 8, knot_c = 8, mod=c('d','d','l'))
summary(re)
#> Length Class Mode
#> D_a 81 -none- numeric
#> D_c 81 -none- numeric
#> D_e 4 -none- numeric
#> pheno_m 5000 -none- numeric
#> pheno_d 5000 -none- numeric
#> T_m 5000 -none- numeric
#> T_d 5000 -none- numeric
#> knot_a 12 -none- numeric
#> knot_c 12 -none- numeric
#> knot_e 2 -none- numeric
#> beta_a 9 -none- numeric
#> beta_c 9 -none- numeric
#> beta_e 2 -none- numeric
#> con 1 -none- numeric
#> lik 1 -none- numeric
#> iter 5 -none- numeric
#> var_b_a 1 -none- numeric
#> var_b_c 1 -none- numeric
#> var_b_e 1 -none- numeric
#> mod 3 -none- character
#> hessian 9 -none- numeric
The AtCtEtp
function finds MLE of the variance \(\sigma^{2}_{\beta^{A,C,E}}\) using the
integrated likelihood and also provides estimates of the spline
coefficients, i.e. \(\beta^{A,C,E}\),
which are based on maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. For a variance
component of log-linearity (the E component in this example), \(\beta\) is a vector of two elements that
\(exp(\beta)\) are the variances of
this component at the minimum and maximum age in the dataset. To obtain
the empirical Bayes estimates of \(\beta^{A,C,E}\) and the covariance matrix
using the MCMC method, we then call the acetp_mcmc
function
by plugging the result from the AtCtEtp
function. We can
also specify the numbers of the MCMC iterations and burn-in.
re_mcmc <- acetp_mcmc(re, iter_num = 5000, burnin = 500)
summary(re_mcmc)
#> Length Class Mode
#> beta_a_mc 9 -none- numeric
#> beta_c_mc 9 -none- numeric
#> beta_e_mc 2 -none- numeric
#> cov_mc 400 -none- numeric
#> knots_a 12 -none- numeric
#> knots_c 12 -none- numeric
#> knots_e 2 -none- numeric
#> min_t 1 -none- numeric
#> max_t 1 -none- numeric
Given the esimates together with their covariance matrix, we can plot
the variance curves or dynamic heritability by calling the
plot_acet
function. The boot
option is ignored
for the ACE(t)-p model.
plot_acet(re_mcmc)
plot_acet(re_mcmc, heri=TRUE)
Assigning too many knots in the ACE(t)-p model is much less harmful than that in the ACE(t) model. Comparing the following two plots from the application of the two models with 10 knots for each component to the example data set, it suggests that the ACE(t) model has an overfitting problem but the ACE(t)-p model works properly.