A new information-theoretic approach to detect gene-gene interactions in case-control studies

Gene-gene interaction is an important factor to consider in selecting genes in genotype data or microarray expression data for association with diseases. However current definitions of gene-gene interaction are not very clear and accurate. An inequality is proved in this paper and a new definition of gene-gene interaction: conditional independence and redundancy based definition of gene-gene interaction (CIR), together with a definition of interaction group are proposed according to this inequality. A new algorithm to detect gene-gene interaction with order greater than two is also proposed based on these new definitions and a theorem. Experimental results show the usefulness of these new definitions and the effectiveness and efficiency of this new algorithm.