Fig. 3

Simulation results for single variable importance measures. On the vertical axis, the proportion of simulation replications in which both interacting SNPs were included in the top k SNPs according to the ranking by the variable importance measures is shown. On the horizontal axis, the number of k top SNPs considered is shown. If the importance measure included both interacting SNPs in the top k SNPs, they were captured. In (a) to (d), different simulation scenarios are shown. The parameters β _I and β _M correspond to the effects of the interacting SNPs and marginal-only SNPs, respectively. M A F _I and M A F _M are the minor allele frequencies of the corresponding SNPs. See Figures S1–S24 (Additional file 4) for results of all simulation scenarios for the single variable importance measures