# Incorporating contextual information into KGWAS for interpretable GWAS discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25855 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25855/

## Key facts

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- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Abstract (arXiv)

Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) identify associations between genetic variants and disease; however, moving beyond associations to causal mechanisms is critical for therapeutic target prioritization. The recently proposed Knowledge Graph GWAS (KGWAS) framework addresses this challenge by linking genetic variants to downstream gene-gene interactions via a knowledge graph (KG), thereby improving detection power and providing mechanistic insights. However, the original KGWAS implementation relies on a large general-purpose KG, which can introduce spurious correlations. We hypothesize that cell-type specific KGs from disease-relevant cell types will better support disease mechanism discovery. Here, we show that the general-purpose KG in KGWAS can be substantially pruned with no loss of statistical power on downstream tasks, and that performance further improves by incorporating gene-gene relationships derived from perturb-seq data. Importantly, using a sparse, context-specific KG from direct perturb-seq evidence yields more consistent and biologically robust disease-critical networks.