How Machine Learning Is Transforming Bioscience Research

How is machine learning transforming bioscience research? The relationship between biology and machine learning is not new and has existed for decades, even before data science and machine learning became fashionable. Fields like protein structure prediction, homology modeling [1] [2] [3] and cheminformatics [4] frequently employ tools from machine learning. For a long time machine learning was defined by the ability to choose effective features, which is often (a) labor intensive and (b) requires a need to understand or have an idea about solutions, which limited the application of machine learning. It is also important to keep in mind that biological data derived from experiments are prone to error, hence domain specific knowledge is almost always required, and biological or-omics data tend to be high dimensional and sparse.