Patent ID: 7627436

Claim:
A method of selecting a SNP marker set to discriminate presence or absence of a disease in a subject, comprising: amplifying and determining sequences of a plurality of SNPs in DNA samples from a case population having a disease and from a control population and determining a plurality of SNP markers associated with the disease; selecting a maximum number of SNP markers from the plurality of SNP markers associated with the disease for a SNP marker set to discriminate presence or absence of the disease in a subject by; calculating for each SNP marker in the plurality of SNP markers a difference in frequency of occurrence between cases and controls to obtain an allelic association t i ; ordering the allelic associations of the SNP markers so that the allelic association with the highest value has rank 1 , such that S(n)=t i , wherein n represents a rank, and t i represents the allelic association of the ith SNP marker, which has rank n; calculating ΣS(n)=S(1)+S(2)+ . . . +S(n) for each SNP marker; calculating a degree of contribution for each SNP marker, wherein the degree of contribution=S(i)/ΣS(i); selecting a minimum value for the degree of contribution of a ranked SNP marker; and selecting as the maximum number (j) of SNP markers for a SNP marker set the rank i having the smallest degree of contribution greater than the minimum value; performing discrimination analysis on combinations of the SNP markers consisting of up to j SNP markers; and analyzing each combination by receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis to determine an area under the curve; selecting a SNP marker set having the highest association with the disease from the analyzed combinations, wherein the selected SNP marker set is the analyzed combination having the largest area under the curve, the highest sensitivity, the lowest specificity, or the smallest number of SNP markers; and, outputting the selected SNP marker set to a user.