A comparative study on the unified model based multifactor dimensionality reduction methods for identifying gene-gene interactions associated with the survival phenotype.

Both KM-UMMDR and Cox2-UMMDR were easily implemented by combining KM-MDR and Cox-MDR with UM-MDR, respectively, to detect significant gene-gene interactions associated with survival time without cross-validation and permutation testing. The simulation results demonstrate the utility of KM-UMMDR, Cox2-UMMDR and Cox-UMMDR, which outperforms Cox-MDR and KM-MDR when some SNPs with only marginal effects might mask the detection of causal epistasis. In addition, Cox-UMMDR, Cox2-UMMDR and Cox-MDR performed better than KM-UMMDR and KM-MDR when there were potentially confounding covariate effects.