Unified Cox model based multifactor dimensionality reduction method for gene-gene interaction analysis of the survival phenotype.

Cox UM-MDR is easily implemented by combining Cox-MDR with UM-MDR to detect the significant gene-gene interactions associated with the survival time without cross-validation and permutation testing. The simulation results are shown to demonstrate the utility of the proposed method, which achieves at least the same power as Cox-MDR in most scenarios, and outperforms Cox-MDR when some SNPs having only marginal effects might mask the detection of the causal epistasis.