Leveraging correlations between variants in polygenic risk scores to detect heterogeneity in GWAS cohorts

Evidence from both GWAS and clinical observation has suggested that certain psychiatric, metabolic, and autoimmune diseases are heterogeneous, comprising multiple subtypes with distinct genomic etiologies and Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS). However, the presence of subtypes within many phenotypes is frequently unknown. We present CLiP (Correlated Liability Predictors), a method to detect heterogeneity in single GWAS cohorts. CLiP calculates a weighted sum of correlations between SNPs contributing to a PRS on the case/control liability scale. We demonstrate mathematically and through simulation that among i.i.d. homogeneous cases generated by a liability threshold model, significant anti-correlations are expected between otherwise independent predictors due to ascertainment on the hidden liability score. In the presence of heterogeneity from distinct etiologies, confounding by covariates, or mislabeling, these correlation patterns are altered predictably. We further extend our method to two additional association study designs: CLiP-X for quantitative predictors in applications such as transcriptome-wide association, and CLiP-Y for quantitative phenotypes, where there is no clear distinction between cases and controls. Through simulations, we demonstrate that CLiP and its extensions reliably distinguish between homogeneous and heterogeneous cohorts when the PRS explains as low as 3% of variance on the liability scale and cohorts comprise 50, 000 − 100, 000 samples, an increasingly practical size for modern GWAS. We apply CLiP to heterogeneity detection in schizophrenia cohorts totaling > 50, 000 cases and controls collected by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. We observe significant heterogeneity in mega-analysis of the combined PGC data (p-value 8.54 × 0 −4 ), as well as in individual cohorts meta-analyzed using Fisher’s method (p-value 0.03), based on significantly associated variants. We also apply CLiP-Y to detect heterogeneity in neuroticism in over 10, 000 individuals from the UK Biobank and detect heterogeneity with a p-value of 1.68 × 10 −9 . Scores were not significantly reduced when partitioning by known subclusters (“Depression” and “Worry”), suggesting that these factors are not the primary source of observed heterogeneity.