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Collaborating Authors

 Zhang, Zhaolei


Unsupervised Learning in Genome Informatics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

With different genomes available, unsupervised learning algorithms are essential in learning genome-wide biological insights. Especially, the functional characterization of different genomes is essential for us to understand lives. In this book chapter, we review the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning algorithms for genome informatics from DNA to MicroRNA. DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid) is the basic component of genomes. A significant fraction of DNA regions (transcription factor binding sites) are bound by proteins (transcription factors) to regulate gene expression at different development stages in different tissues. To fully understand genetics, it is necessary of us to apply unsupervised learning algorithms to learn and infer those DNA regions. Here we review several unsupervised learning methods for deciphering the genome-wide patterns of those DNA regions. MicroRNA (miRNA), a class of small endogenous non-coding RNA (RiboNucleic acid) species, regulate gene expression post-transcriptionally by forming imperfect base-pair with the target sites primarily at the 3$'$ untranslated regions of the messenger RNAs. Since the 1993 discovery of the first miRNA \emph{let-7} in worms, a vast amount of studies have been dedicated to functionally characterizing the functional impacts of miRNA in a network context to understand complex diseases such as cancer. Here we review several representative unsupervised learning frameworks on inferring miRNA regulatory network by exploiting the static sequence-based information pertinent to the prior knowledge of miRNA targeting and the dynamic information of miRNA activities implicated by the recently available large data compendia, which interrogate genome-wide expression profiles of miRNAs and/or mRNAs across various cell conditions.


Large-Margin kNN Classification Using a Deep Encoder Network

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

KNN is one of the most popular classification methods, but it often fails to work well with inappropriate choice of distance metric or due to the presence of numerous class-irrelevant features. Linear feature transformation methods have been widely applied to extract class-relevant information to improve kNN classification, which is very limited in many applications. Kernels have been used to learn powerful non-linear feature transformations, but these methods fail to scale to large datasets. In this paper, we present a scalable non-linear feature mapping method based on a deep neural network pretrained with restricted boltzmann machines for improving kNN classification in a large-margin framework, which we call DNet-kNN. DNet-kNN can be used for both classification and for supervised dimensionality reduction. The experimental results on two benchmark handwritten digit datasets show that DNet-kNN has much better performance than large-margin kNN using a linear mapping and kNN based on a deep autoencoder pretrained with retricted boltzmann machines.