Evaluating the detection ability of a range of epistasis detection methods on simulated data for pure and impure epistatic models.

For pure, two locus interactions, PLINK's implementation of BOOST recovered the highest number of correct interactions, with 53.9% and significantly better performing than the other methods (p = 4.52e - 36). For impure two locus interactions, MDR exhibited the best performance, recovering 62.2% of the most significant impure epistatic interactions (p = 6.31e - 90 for all but one test). The assessment of three locus interaction prediction revealed that wtest recovered the highest number (17.2%) of pure epistatic interactions(p = 8.49e - 14). wtest also recovered the highest number of three locus impure epistatic interactions (p = 6.76e - 48) while AntEpiSeeker ranked as the most significant the highest number of such interactions (40.5%). Finally, when applied to a real dataset for Atrial Fibrillation, most notably finding an interaction between SYNE2 and DTNB.