Hi guys, I am working with the MetaSubtract package ( https://rdrr.io/cran/MetaSubtract/) in R. This package enables to subtract from the summary statistics of a meta-analysis the contribution of a single or multiple cohorts being part of that meta-analysis.
In doing it, I need to write down the following command:
meta.subtract("4BCX2_BAS_EA_GWAMA.out", "GCST90002379_Vuckovic2020_Ba_count.tsv", metamethod = "FIV", lambda.meta = 1,
lambdas.cohort = 1, gc_meta = FALSE, calculate_lambda.meta = FALSE,
calculate_lambdas.cohort = FALSE, alternative = "alternative_headers.txt",
save.as.data.frame = TRUE,
savefile = "BCX2_BAS_EA2020_withoutUKBB_MetaSubtract.txt"
)
where 4BCX2_BAS_EA_GWAMA.out
is the sumstats of the meta-analysis, and it has the following aspect:
rs_number reference_allele other_allele eaf beta se beta_95L beta_95U z p-value _-log10_p-value q_statistic q_p-value i2 n_studies n_samples effects
10:100000625_A_G G A 0.433704 -0.000714 0.002061 -0.004755 0.003326 -0.346486 0.728988 0.137280 16.477536 0.224301 0.211047 14 473945 --+--+--++-+-+
10:100000645_A_C C A 0.204581 0.001467 0.002534 -0.003500 0.006433 0.578794 0.562750 0.249684 12.374311 0.497215 0.000000 14 473977 +-++--++--+-+-
10:100002464_C_T C T 0.013921 -0.002998 0.009265 -0.021157 0.015161 -0.323600 0.746248 0.127117 12.893690 0.456057 0.000000 14 474001 +++---++++-+++
10:100003242_G_T G T 0.115296 -0.003044 0.003200 -0.009315 0.003228 -0.951205 0.341491 0.466621 12.762988 0.466281 0.000000 14 473999 --++++-------+
GCST90002379_Vuckovic2020_Ba_count.tsv
is the sumstats of the single cohort which I want to remove from the meta-analysis and it has the following aspect:
VARIANT other_allele effect_allele beta p_value standard_error effect_allele_frequency
1:10177_A_AC A AC -0.00282646 0.39 0.00329265 0.398249 0.398249 0.00000382901614652101
1:10352_T_TA T TA 0.0038701 0.25 0.00339105 0.392805 0.392805 0.00000714462704979404
1:10511_G_A G A -0.029287 0.53 0.0469668 0.00126099999999996 0.00126099999999996 0.00000216046316283424
while I wrote the alternative_headers.txt"
file in this way:
MARKER rs_number
MARKER VARIANT
EFFECTALLELE reference_allele
EFFECTALLELE effect_allele
OTHERALLELE other_allele
OTHERALLELE other_allele
BETA beta
BETA beta
EAF eaf
EAF effect_allele_frequency
NSTUDIES n_studies
I2HET i2
P p-value
P p_value
SE se
SE standard_error
Z z
QHETP q_p-value
LP LP
QHET q_statistic
DIRECTIONS effects
N n_samples
in the first column you can see the variable names as used in the script, the second one contains the header names as specified in the input files.
When I run the meta.subtract() command, I got the following error message:
Error in if (markercol == 0) { : argument is of length zero
I checked the source code at the following page https://rdrr.io/cran/MetaSubtract/src/R/MetaSubtract.r and it seems to be a problem related to the MARKER column... but I don't know how to fix it...
Could someone suggest how to fix it? Thank you!
I think
alternative_headers.txt
needs a header row, try adding "col1 col2" in the first row.It still does not work and I got the same error message