Towards a robust out-of-the-box neural network model for genomic data.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The accurate prediction of biological features from genomic data is paramount for precision medicine and sustainable agriculture. For decades, neural network models have been widely popular in fields like computer vision, astrophysics and targeted marketing given their prediction accuracy and their robust performance under big data settings. Yet neural network models have not made a successful transition into the medical and biological world due to the ubiquitous characteristics of biological data such as modest sample sizes, sparsity, and extreme heterogeneity.

Authors

  • Zhaoyi Zhang
    Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
  • Songyang Cheng
    Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
  • Claudia Solis-Lemus
    Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Department of Plant Pathology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. solislemus@wisc.edu.