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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (7 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2019)

Rapidly moving technologies are transforming the rate at which researchers accumulate information. Large, rich datasets hold promises of new insights into complex natural phenomena that will help advance the frontier of science. Here we aim to develop new statistics/data science principles and scalable algorithms for extracting reliable and reproducible information from these data.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the work contained in this thesis. It discusses the growing availability of genomic data and the statistical machine learning tools that are being used to provide a systems-level understanding of genomic phenomena.

Chapter 2 introduces the predictability, computability, and stability (PCS) framework. The PCS framework builds on key ideas in machine learning, using predictability as a reality check and evaluating computational considerations in data collection, data storage and algorithm design. It augments predictability and computability with an overarching stability principle, which expands statistical uncertainty considerations to assesses how results vary with respect to choices (or perturbations) made across the data science life cycle. In this chapter, we develop PCS inference through perturbation intervals and PCS hypothesis testing to investigate the reliability of data results. We compare PCS inference with existing methods in high-dimensional sparse linear model simulations to demonstrate that our approach compares favorably to others, in terms of ROC curves, over a wide range of simulation settings. Finally, we propose documentation based on R Markdown, iPython, or Jupyter Notebook, with publicly available, reproducible codes and narratives to justify human choices made throughout an analysis.

As an example of the PCS framework in practice, chapter 3 develops the iterative Random Forest algorithm (iRF). iRF trains a feature-weighted ensemble of decision trees to detect stable, high-order interactions with same order of computational cost as Random Forests (RF). We demonstrate the utility of iRF for high-order interaction discovery in two prediction problems: enhancer activity in the early Drosophila embryo and alternative splicing of primary transcripts in human derived cell lines. In Drosophila, 80% of the pairwise transcription factor interactions iRF identified as stable have been previously reported as physical interactions. Moreover, novel third-order interactions, e.g. between Zelda (Zld), Giant (Gt), and Twist (Twi), suggest high-order relationships that are candidates for follow-up experiments. In human-derived cells, iRF re-discovered a central role of H3K36me3 in chromatin-mediated splicing regulation, and identified novel 5th and 6th order interactions, indicative of multi-valent nucleosomes with specific roles in splicing regulation. By decoupling the order of interactions from the computational cost of identification, iRF opens new avenues of inquiry into the molecular mechanisms underlying genome biology.

Chapter 4 refines iRF to explicitly map responses as a function of interacting features. Our proposed method, signed iRF (siRF), describes "subsets" of rules that frequently occur on RF decision paths. We refer to these rule subsets as signed interactions. RF decision paths containing the same signed interaction share not only a set of interacting features but also exhibit similar thresholding behavior, and thus describe a consistent functional relationship between interacting features and responses. We formulate stable and predictive importance metrics (SPIMs) to rank signed interactions in terms of their stability, predictive accuracy, and strength of interaction. For each SPIM, we define null importance metrics that characterize its expected behavior under known structure. We evaluate siRF in biologically inspired simulations and two case studies: predicting enhancer activity and spatial gene expression patterns. In the case of spatial gene expression patterns, siRF recovered all 11 reported links in the gap gene network. In the case of enhancer activity, siRF discovered rules that identify enhancer elements in Drosophila embryos with high precision, suggesting candidate biological mechanisms for experimental studies. By refining the process of interaction discovery, siRF has the potential to guide mechanistic inquiry into systems whose scale and complexity is beyond human comprehension.

    Cover page: Domain-inspired machine learning for hypothesis extraction in biological data
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
      Genomics has revolutionized biology, enabling the interrogation of whole transcriptomes, genome-wide binding sites for proteins, and many other molecular processes. However, individual genomic assays measure elements that interact in vivo as components of larger molecular machines. Understanding how these high-order interactions drive gene expression presents a substantial statistical challenge. Building on random forests (RFs) and random intersection trees (RITs) and through extensive, biologically inspired simulations, we developed the iterative random forest algorithm (iRF). iRF trains a feature-weighted ensemble of decision trees to detect stable, high-order interactions with the same order of computational cost as the RF. We demonstrate the utility of iRF for high-order interaction discovery in two prediction problems: enhancer activity in the early Drosophila embryo and alternative splicing of primary transcripts in human-derived cell lines. In Drosophila, among the 20 pairwise transcription factor interactions iRF identifies as stable (returned in more than half of bootstrap replicates), 80% have been previously reported as physical interactions. Moreover, third-order interactions, e.g., between Zelda (Zld), Giant (Gt), and Twist (Twi), suggest high-order relationships that are candidates for follow-up experiments. In human-derived cells, iRF rediscovered a central role of H3K36me3 in chromatin-mediated splicing regulation and identified interesting fifth- and sixth-order interactions, indicative of multivalent nucleosomes with specific roles in splicing regulation. By decoupling the order of interactions from the computational cost of identification, iRF opens additional avenues of inquiry into the molecular mechanisms underlying genome biology.
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC San Francisco Previously Published Works (2023)
        High-content microscopy offers a scalable approach to screen against multiple targets in a single pass. Prior work has focused on methods to select "optimal" cellular readouts in microscopy screens. However, methods to select optimal cell line models have garnered much less attention. Here, we provide a roadmap for how to select the cell line or lines that are best suited to identify bioactive compounds and their mechanism of action (MOA). We test our approach on compounds targeting cancer-relevant pathways, ranking cell lines in two tasks: detecting compound activity ("phenoactivity") and grouping compounds with similar MOA by similar phenotype ("phenosimilarity"). Evaluating six cell lines across 3214 well-annotated compounds, we show that optimal cell line selection depends on both the task of interest (e.g., detecting phenoactivity vs inferring phenosimilarity) and distribution of MOAs within the compound library. Given a task of interest and a set of compounds, we provide a systematic framework for choosing optimal cell line(s). Our framework can be used to reduce the number of cell lines required to identify hits within a compound library and help accelerate the pace of early drug discovery.
          Cover page: Selection of Optimal Cell Lines for High-Content Phenotypic Screening
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2019)
          Machine-learning models have demonstrated great success in learning complex patterns that enable them to make predictions about unobserved data. In addition to using models for prediction, the ability to interpret what a model has learned is receiving an increasing amount of attention. However, this increased focus has led to considerable confusion about the notion of interpretability. In particular, it is unclear how the wide array of proposed interpretation methods are related and what common concepts can be used to evaluate them. We aim to address these concerns by defining interpretability in the context of machine learning and introducing the predictive, descriptive, relevant (PDR) framework for discussing interpretations. The PDR framework provides 3 overarching desiderata for evaluation: predictive accuracy, descriptive accuracy, and relevancy, with relevancy judged relative to a human audience. Moreover, to help manage the deluge of interpretation methods, we introduce a categorization of existing techniques into model-based and post hoc categories, with subgroups including sparsity, modularity, and simulatability. To demonstrate how practitioners can use the PDR framework to evaluate and understand interpretations, we provide numerous real-world examples. These examples highlight the often underappreciated role played by human audiences in discussions of interpretability. Finally, based on our framework, we discuss limitations of existing methods and directions for future work. We hope that this work will provide a common vocabulary that will make it easier for both practitioners and researchers to discuss and choose from the full range of interpretation methods.
            Cover page: Definitions, methods, and applications in interpretable machine learning
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Santa Cruz Previously Published Works (2021)
            Increasing occurrence of harmful algal blooms across the land-water interface poses significant risks to coastal ecosystem structure and human health. Defining significant drivers and their interactive impacts on blooms allows for more effective analysis and identification of specific conditions supporting phytoplankton growth. A novel iterative Random Forests (iRF) machine-learning model was developed and applied to two example cases along the California coast to identify key stable interactions: (1) phytoplankton abundance in response to various drivers due to coastal conditions and land-sea nutrient fluxes, (2) microbial community structure during algal blooms. In Example 1, watershed derived nutrients were identified as the least significant interacting variable associated with Monterey Bay phytoplankton abundance. In Example 2, through iRF analysis of field-based 16S OTU bacterial community and algae datasets, we independently found stable interactions of prokaryote abundance patterns associated with phytoplankton abundance that have been previously identified in laboratory-based studies. Our study represents the first iRF application to marine algal blooms that helps to identify ocean, microbial, and terrestrial conditions that are considered dominant causal factors on bloom dynamics.
              Cover page: A novel random forest approach to revealing interactions and controls on chlorophyll concentration and bacterial communities during coastal phytoplankton blooms
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC San Francisco Previously Published Works (2024)
              Detecting epistatic drivers of human phenotypes is a considerable challenge. Traditional approaches use regression to sequentially test multiplicative interaction terms involving pairs of genetic variants. For higher-order interactions and genome-wide large-scale data, this strategy is computationally intractable. Moreover, multiplicative terms used in regression modeling may not capture the form of biological interactions. Building on the Predictability, Computability, Stability (PCS) framework, we introduce the epiTree pipeline to extract higher-order interactions from genomic data using tree-based models. The epiTree pipeline first selects a set of variants derived from tissue-specific estimates of gene expression. Next, it uses iterative random forests (iRF) to search training data for candidate Boolean interactions (pairwise and higher-order). We derive significance tests for interactions, based on a stabilized likelihood ratio test, by simulating Boolean tree-structured null (no epistasis) and alternative (epistasis) distributions on hold-out test data. Finally, our pipeline computes PCS epistasis p-values that probabilisticly quantify improvement in prediction accuracy via bootstrap sampling on the test set. We validate the epiTree pipeline in two case studies using data from the UK Biobank: predicting red hair and multiple sclerosis (MS). In the case of predicting red hair, epiTree recovers known epistatic interactions surrounding MC1R and novel interactions, representing non-linearities not captured by logistic regression models. In the case of predicting MS, a more complex phenotype than red hair, epiTree rankings prioritize novel interactions surrounding HLA-DRB1, a variant previously associated with MS in several populations. Taken together, these results highlight the potential for epiTree rankings to help reduce the design space for follow up experiments.
                Cover page: Learning epistatic polygenic phenotypes with Boolean interactions.
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