  Motivation: Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) seek to identify causal
genomic variants associated with rare human diseases. The classical statistical
approach for detecting these variants is based on univariate hypothesis
testing, with healthy individuals being tested against affected individuals at
each locus. Given that an individual's genotype is characterized by up to one
million SNPs, this approach lacks precision, since it may yield a large number
of false positives that can lead to erroneous conclusions about genetic
associations with the disease. One way to improve the detection of true genetic
associations is to reduce the number of hypotheses to be tested by grouping
SNPs. Results: We propose a dimension-reduction approach which can be applied
in the context of GWAS by making use of the haplotype structure of the human
genome. We compare our method with standard univariate and multivariate
approaches on both synthetic and real GWAS data, and we show that reducing the
dimension of the predictor matrix by aggregating SNPs gives a greater precision
in the detection of associations between the phenotype and genomic regions.
