A robust method to estimate regional polygenic correlation identifies heterogeneity in the shared heritability between complex traits

Abstract Background Complex traits can share a substantial proportion of their polygenic heritability. However, genome-wide polygenic correlations between pairs of traits can mask heterogeneity in their shared polygenic effects across loci. We propose a novel method (WML-RPC) to evaluate polygenic correlation between two complex traits in small genomic regions using summary association statistics. Our method tests for evidence that the …