HIBAG

HIBAG is a software tool designed to address a significant challenge in genetics and disease analysis. It focuses on the genotyping of classical human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles, pivotal in disease analysis and understanding adverse drug reactions related to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The traditional method of high-resolution HLA typing from whole-genome single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) typing or sequencing can be prohibitively expensive for large samples. HIBAG overcomes this obstacle by leveraging the extended haplotype structure within the MHC to predict HLA alleles using dense SNP genotypes available from genome-wide SNP panels, thereby making HLA imputation more accessible and efficient for researchers worldwide.

The core methodology of HIBAG, HLA Imputation, using the BAGging attribute, is robustly validated. It averages HLA-type posterior probabilities across an ensemble of classifiers built on bootstrap samples, enhancing prediction accuracy.