A robust method to estimate regional polygenic correlation under misspecified linkage disequilibrium structure

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 (weighted maximum likelihood-regional polygenic correlation [RPC]) to evaluate polygenic correlation between two complex traits in small genomic regions using summary association statistics. Our method …