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05 · 2025
Role
Solo
Stack
C / C++
Status
In progress

Regenie
Nonlinear

A fork of REGENIE 4.1.2 that extends the toolkit with nonlinear phenotype modelling for large-scale genome-wide association studies.

[ project image / demo ]

The problem

REGENIE is the standard tool for whole-genome regression on biobank-scale data, but it assumes linear relationships between genotype and phenotype. Many complex traits don't fit that assumption — nonlinear effects go undetected.

What I built

A fork of REGENIE 4.1.2 with a nonlinear calculation path added to the step 2 regression. The modification preserves the original tool's memory-efficient block-ridge design while allowing non-linear kernel functions to be swapped in.

What I learned

Large C++ codebases built for performance have very little slack — every added allocation shows up in benchmarks. Getting the nonlinear path to run at biobank scale meant understanding the existing memory layout deeply before touching anything.