HESS

Heritability Estimation from Summary Statistics of genome-wide association studies.

Variance components methods that estimate the aggregate contribution of large sets of variants to the heritability of complex traits have yielded important insights into the genetic architecture of common diseases. Here, we introduce new methods that estimate the total variance in trait explained by the typed variants at a single locus in the genome (local SNP-heritability) from summary GWAS data while accounting for linkage disequilibrium (LD) among variants. Uniquely to our approach, we do not assume an effect size distribution but treat effect sizes as fixed effects in the model.

Beta version of the code can be found here.

Please contact Huwenbo (shihuwenbo@ucla.edu) or Bogdan (pasaniuc@ucla.edu) for any questions/suggestions about the software.

The software is free for non-commercial use, and may be licensed for commercial use.