Machine Learning & Deep Learning

Deep Learning - How it works under the hood

Deep learning is a pretty rich field of research that comprises many different approaches, and there's still a lot to be figured out in terms of what's going to transfer well to any particular problem. For example, the Campagne lab's approach starts from reads and, in their own words, "maps structured data (alignment) to a small number of informative features, which can be used for efficient DL model training". In my work I've chosen to treat the problem as a variant filtering question (or classification in machine learning terms), where I take the output of the caller and use a deep learning process to filter that callset. It seems the Google team's approach is similar in that their software involves a first step that looks a lot like the HaplotypeCaller (which makes sense since Mark and Ryan wrote most of the HC's original code), then applies the deep learning classifier to the variant candidates.

My approach uses variants and annotations encoded as tensors, which carry the precise read and reference sequences, read flags, as well as base and mapping qualities. The modeling architecture I use is specifically designed to process these read tensors, and so avoids the extensive use of maxpooling found in many image classification CNNs (maxpooling is motivated by the smoothness prior of natural images, where neighboring pixels tend to be the same, but DNA sequences are not smooth, so we reserve maxpooling for the deeper layers of the net). Because the tensor dimensions contain different types of data, I convolve each separately so as to allow deep layers in the net to see this meaningful difference. This architecture also integrates annotations seamlessly into the classification, which accelerates learning times dramatically and opens the door to unsupervised training down the road.