Development of the WPC approach and application to linkage analysis of breast cancer

We develop the weighted pairwise correlation approach in several directions: we use a method based on martingale residuals rather than rank residuals; we give a measure of the strength of the linkage and we propose a method for multipoint analysis by combining the weights used in the statistics for different markers. These tools are applied to 214 breast cancer families. The values of the test statistics for the different markers are very similar to those obtained with the led-score approach; the multipoint analysis increases the value of the test statistic and is also in agreement with previous results. (C) 1995 Wiley-Liss, Inc.