A pitfall for machine learning methods aiming to predict across cell types - Genome Biology

Machine learning has been applied to a wide variety of genomic prediction problems, such as predicting transcription factor binding, identifying active cis-regulatory elements, constructing gene regulatory networks, and predicting the effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms. The inputs to these models typically include some combination of nucleotide sequence and signals from epigenomics assays. Given such data, the most common approach to evaluating predictive models is a "cross-chromosomal" strategy, which involves training a separate model for each cell type and partitioning genomic loci into some number of folds for cross-validation (Figure 1a). Typically, the genomic loci are split by chromosome. This strategy has been employed for models that predict gene expression [1–3], elements of chromatin architecture [4, 5], transcription factor binding [6, 7], and cis-regulatory elements [8–13]. Although the cross-chromosomal approach measures how well the model generalizes to new genomic loci, it does not measure how well the model generalizes to new cell types.