Scuba:Scalable kernel-based gene prioritization

Abstract Background The uncovering of genes linked to human diseases is a pressing challenge in molecular biology and precision medicine. This task is often hindered by the large number of candidate genes and by the heterogeneity of the available information. Computational methods for the prioritization of candidate genes can help to cope with these problems. In particular, kernel-based methods are a powerful resource for the integration of heterogeneous biological knowledge, however, their practical implementation is often precluded by their limited scalability. Results We propose Scuba, a scalable kernel-based method for gene prioritization. It implements a novel multiple kernel learning approach, based on a semi-supervised perspective and on the optimization of the margin distribution. Scuba is optimized to cope with strongly unbalanced settings where known disease genes are few and large scale predictions are required. Importantly, it is able to efficiently deal both with a large amount of candidate genes and with an arbitrary number of data sources. As a direct consequence of scalability, Scuba integrates also a new efficient strategy to select optimal kernel parameters for each data source. We performed cross-validation experiments and simulated a realistic usage setting, showing that Scuba outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art methods. Conclusions Scuba achieves state-of-the-art performance and has enhanced scalability compared to existing kernel-based approaches for genomic data. This method can be useful to prioritize candidate genes, particularly when their number is large or when input data is highly heterogeneous. The code is freely available at https://github.com/gzampieri/Scuba

Building multiclass classifiers for remote homology detection and fold recognition

BACKGROUND: Protein remote homology detection and fold recognition are central problems in computational biology. Supervised learning algorithms based on support vector machines are currently one of the most effective methods for solving these problems. These methods are primarily used to solve binary classification problems and they have not been extensively used to solve the more general multiclass remote homology prediction and fold recognition problems. RESULTS: We present a comprehensive evaluation of a number of methods for building SVM-based multiclass classification schemes in the context of the SCOP protein classification. These methods include schemes that directly build an SVM-based multiclass model, schemes that employ a second-level learning approach to combine the predictions generated by a set of binary SVM-based classifiers, and schemes that build and combine binary classifiers for various levels of the SCOP hierarchy beyond those defining the target classes. CONCLUSION: Analyzing the performance achieved by the different approaches on four different datasets we show that most of the proposed multiclass SVM-based classification approaches are quite effective in solving the remote homology prediction and fold recognition problems and that the schemes that use predictions from binary models constructed for ancestral categories within the SCOP hierarchy tend to not only lead to lower error rates but also reduce the number of errors in which a superfamily is assigned to an entirely different fold and a fold is predicted as being from a different SCOP class. Our results also show that the limited size of the training data makes it hard to learn complex second-level models, and that models of moderate complexity lead to consistently better results

Propositional kernels

The pervasive presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday life has nourished the pursuit of explainable AI. Since the dawn of AI, logic has been widely used to express, in a human-friendly fashion, the internal process that led an (intelligent) system to deliver a specific output. In this paper, we take a step forward in this direction by introducing a novel family of kernels, called Propositional kernels, that construct feature spaces that are easy to interpret. Specifically, Propositional Kernel functions compute the similarity between two binary vectors in a feature space composed of logical propositions of a fixed form. The Propositional kernel framework improves upon the recent Boolean kernel framework by providing more expressive kernels. In addition to the theoretical definitions, we also provide an algorithm (and the source code) to efficiently construct any propositional kernel. An extensive empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of Propositional kernels on several artificial and benchmark categorical data sets