Deep learning meets genome biology

Frey is a co-founder of Deep Genomics, a professor at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of its Machine Learning Group, a senior fellow of the Neural Computation program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. My team studied learning and inference in deep architectures, using algorithms based on variational methods, message passing, and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. My group's approach was inspired by Beer and Tavazoie's work, but differed in three ways: we examined mammalian cells, we used more advanced machine learning techniques, and we focused on splicing instead of transcription. We built a framework for extracting biological features from genomic sequences, pre-processing the noisy experimental data, and training machine learning techniques to predict splicing patterns from DNA.