A Refined and Heuristic Algorithm for LD tagSNPs Selection

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) play an important role in Genome-wide Association Studies. To reduce genotyping costs, several LD tagSNPs selection algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages of current LD tagSNPs selection algorithms are analyzed. And a refined and heuristic algorithm HTag for LD tagSNPs selection is developed: (1) The tagSNPs selection procedure of Xu et al. is modified to improve selection performance. (2) A strategy to optimize the selection result is proposed. Using data downloaded from the HapMap Project, the performance of these methods is evaluated and our algorithm shows improvements in tagging efficiency.