Chen, ZhongxueYang, WilliamLiu, QingzhongYang, Jack YLi, JingYang, Mary Qu2015-03-022014Chen, Zhongxue, William Yang, Qingzhong Liu, Jack Y Yang, Jing Li, and Mary Qu Yang. 2014. “A new statistical approach to combining p-values using gamma distribution and its application to genome-wide association study.” BMC Bioinformatics 15 (Suppl 17): S3. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-15-S17-S3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-15-S17-S3.1471-2105http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:14065442Background: Combining information from different studies is an important and useful practice in bioinformatics, including genome-wide association study, rare variant data analysis and other set-based analyses. Many statistical methods have been proposed to combine p-values from independent studies. However, it is known that there is no uniformly most powerful test under all conditions; therefore, finding a powerful test in specific situation is important and desirable. Results: In this paper, we propose a new statistical approach to combining p-values based on gamma distribution, which uses the inverse of the p-value as the shape parameter in the gamma distribution. Conclusions: Simulation study and real data application demonstrate that the proposed method has good performance under some situations.en-USFisher testLancaster methodrare variant association testz-testJournal Article2015-03-0210.1186/1471-2105-15-S17-S3