A robust and adaptive framework for interaction testing in quantitative traits between multiple genetic loci and exposure variables

The identification and understanding of gene-environment interactions can provide insights into the pathways and mechanisms underlying complex diseases. However, testing for gene-environment interaction remains a challenge since statistical power is often limited, the specification of environmental effects is nontrivial, and such misspecifications can lead to false positive findings. To address the lack of statistical power, recent methods aim to identify interactions on an aggregated level using, for example, polygenic risk scores. While this strategy increases power to detect interactions, identifying contributing key genes and pathways is difficult based on these global results. Here, we propose RITSS (Robust Interaction Testing using Sample Splitting), a gene-environment interaction testing framework for quantitative traits that is based on sample splitting and robust test statistics. RITSS can incorporate multiple genetic variants and/or multiple environmental factors. Using sample splitting, a screening step enables the selection and combination of potential interactions into scores with improved interpretability, based on the user’s unrestricted choices for statistical/machine learning approaches. In the testing step, the application of robust test statistics minimizes the susceptibility of the results to main effect misspecifications. Using extensive simulation studies, we demonstrate that RITSS controls the type 1 error rate in a wide range of scenarios. In an application to lung function phenotypes and human height in the UK Biobank, RITSS identified genome-wide significant interactions with subcomponents of genetic risk scores. While the contributing single variant interactions are moderate, our analysis results indicate interesting interaction patterns that result in strong aggregated signals that provide further insights into gene-environment interaction mechanisms.