The dissection of complex diseases is one of the greatest challenges of human genetics
with important clinical and scientific applications. Traditionally, associations were sought between
single genetic markers and disease. The availability of large scale SNP data makes it possible, for
the first time, to study the predictive power of genotypes and haplotypes with respect to phenotype
data. Here we present a novel method for predicting phenotype information from genotype data. The
method is based on a support vector machine that employs new kernel functions for the similarity
between genotypes or their underlying haplotypes. We demonstrate our approach on SNP data for
the apolipoprotein gene cluster in baboons, predicting plasma lipid levels with significant success
rates, and identifying associations that were not detected using extant approaches.