Picking single-nucleotide polymorphisms in forests

With the development of high-throughput single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) technologies, the vast number of SNPs in smaller samples poses a challenge to the application of classical statistical procedures. A possible solution is to use a two-stage approach for case-control data in which, in the first stage, a screening test selects a small number of SNPs for further analysis. The second stage then estimates the effects of the selected variables using logistic regression (logReg). Here, we introduce a novel approach in which the selection of SNPs is based on the permutation importance estimated by random forests (RFs). For this, we used the simulated data provided for the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 without knowledge of the true model.