Decision forest analysis of large-scale sib-pair identical-by-decent profiles for locating the underlying disease genes for alcoholism in human.

Objective: To extract the relevant SNPs for alcoholism using sib-pair IBD profiles of pedigrees. Methods: We used the ensemble decision approach, a supervised learning approach based on decision forests, to locate alcoholism relevant SNPs using genome-wide SNP data. Results: Application to a publicly available large dataset of 100 simulated replicates for three American populations (http://www.gaworkshop.org/) demonstrates that the proposed approach has successfully located all of the simulated true loci. Conclusion: The numerical results establish the proposed decision forest analysis to be a powerful and practical alternative for large-scale family-based association study.