lab.michoel.info
Lingfei’s paper, “High-dimensional Bayesian network inference from systems genetics data using genetic node ordering” has been published in Frontiers in Genetics, in a Special Topic on Machine Learning and Network-Driven Integrative Genomics.
In this paper, we present a highly efficient approach for reconstructing Bayesian gene regulatory networks when prior information for the inclusion of edges exists or can be inferred from the available data. The method is implemented in the Findr software.
Pau’s paper “Model-based clustering of multi-tissue gene expression data” has been published in Bioinformatics. In this paper a method, called “revamp”, is introduced to find clusters (groups of genes with shared activity patterns) in multi-tissue data, where gene expression profiles are available from multiple tissues or organs sampled from the same group of individuals. Revamp improves existing methods by its ability to incorporate prior information on physiological tissue similarity, and by identifying a set of clusters, each consisting of a core set of genes conserved across tissues as well as differential sets of genes specific to one or more subsets of tissues. Revamp is implemented in the Lemon-Tree software.
Lingfei’s paper “Accurate wisdom of the crowd from unsupervised dimension reduction” has been published in Royal Society Open Science. In this paper it is shown that wisdom of the crowd, the collective intelligence derived from responses of multiple individuals to the same questions, is analogous to one-dimensional unsupervised dimension reduction in machine learning. This means that many of-the-shelf dimension reduction methods, such as good old PCA, can be repurposed as crowd-wisdom methods, usually with (much) better performance than existing default crowd-wisdom methods. Perhaps one of the more surprising results concerned the classification of skin images as being cancerous or not. As part of the hype surrounding deep learning, it was recently found that a deep neural network trained on 130,000 images was better at classifying a test set of 111 skin images than 21 individual dermatologists. However, we found that by doing a simple PCA of the predictions of these 21 dermatologists, they collectively outperformed the deep neural network. As The Economist put it in their recent ad, “not all intelligence is artificial”. In fact some of it is collective.
Sid’s paper Application of long read sequencing to determine expressed antigen diversity in Trypanosoma brucei infections has been published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Congrats again to Sid and everyone who contributed!
A new preprint, “High-dimensional Bayesian network inference from systems genetics data using genetic node ordering”, is available on bioRxiv. Bayesian networks are statistical models for gene regulatory networks, and their inference from large-scale omics data is a major problem in systems genetics. In this paper we present an algorithm to solve this problem that uses causal inference, topological sorting and variable selection, and that is much more efficient than traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The algorithm is implemented in the Findr and lassopv software packages.
We contributed two chapters to a Methods in Molecular Biology book on Gene Regulatory Networks: a chapter by Lingfei about the use of Findr for the inference of transcriptome-wide causal networks, and a chapter by Pau about the use of lemon-tree for the inference of differential module networks.
My paper “Analytic solution and stationary phase approximation for the Bayesian lasso and elastic net” has been accepted to NeurIPS. A great excuse to visit the largest conference in machine learning and AI!
It’s been a long time in the making, but Sid’s work on using long read sequencing to determine expressed antigen diversity in Trypanosoma brucei infections has finally been posted on bioRxiv!
In this collaboration with Liam Morrison, we applied long read sequencing (PacBio) to VSG amplicons generated from blood extracted from mice infected with T. brucei. We found that long read sequencing is reliable for resolving allelic differences between VSGs, that there is significant expressed diversity (449 VSGs detected across 20 mice) and that there is a striking semi-reproducible pattern of expressed diversity across the timeframe of study.
Well done Sid and everyone else who contributed to this study!
There is a lot of research showing that genetic information in combination with gene expression data can be used to predict causal interactions between genes, on the basis that genetic variation among individuals causes gene expression variation but not vice versa (this PLOS CompBio article is a contribution to the field from our group and has links to earlier work). Anagha Joshi’s group asked if this principle could be extended to other contexts, and in a joint preprint “Causal gene regulatory network inference using enhancer activity as a causal anchor” an affirmative answer is given: variation of epigenetic activity at enhancer elements across multiple cell types or experimental treatments together with gene expression data also predicts causal interactions. The accompanying statistical methods have been implemented in our Findr software.
A preprint on “Model-based clustering of multi-tissue gene expression data” is available from arXiv. In this paper we present a Bayesian model-based clustering algorithm for large-scale, multi-tissue gene expression data, where expression profiles are obtained from multiple tissues or organs sampled from dozens to hundreds of individuals. Our model can incorporate prior information on physiological tissue similarity, and results in a set of clusters, each consisting of a core set of genes conserved across tissues as well as differential sets of genes specific to one or more subsets of tissues. The algorithm has been implemented in the Lemon-Tree software as a new “task”, revamp.