arXiv · 2601.01860
High-Order Epistasis Detection Using Factorization Machine with Quadratic Optimization Annealing and MDR-Based Evaluation
Abstract
Detecting high-order epistasis is a fundamental challenge in genetic association studies due to the combinatorial explosion of candidate locus combinations. Although multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) is a widely used method for evaluating epistasis, exhaustive MDR-based searches become computationally infeasible as the number of loci or the interaction order increases. In this paper, we define the epistasis detection problem as a black-box optimization problem and solve it with a factorization machine with quadratic-optimization annealing (FMQA). We propose an efficient epistasis detection method based on FMQA, in which the classification error rate (CER) computed by MDR is used as a black-box objective function. Experimental evaluations were conducted using simulated case-control datasets with predefined high-order epistasis. The results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully identified ground-truth epistasis across various interaction orders and the numbers of genetic loci within a limited number of iterations. These results indicate that the proposed method is effective and computationally efficient for high-order epistasis detection.
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Shuta Kikuchi, Shu Tanaka. 2026-01-05. High-Order Epistasis Detection Using Factorization Machine with Quadratic Optimization Annealing and MDR-Based Evaluation. https://doi.org/10.1109/qcnc69040.2026.00152
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