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Biophysical models of cis-regulation as interpretable neural networks

Ammar Tareen, View ORCID ProfileJustin B. Kinney
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/835942
Ammar Tareen
Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724
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Justin B. Kinney
Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724
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  • ORCID record for Justin B. Kinney
  • For correspondence: jkinney@cshl.edu
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Abstract

The adoption of deep learning techniques in genomics has been hindered by the difficulty of mechanistically interpreting the models that these techniques produce. In recent years, a variety of post-hoc attribution methods have been proposed for addressing this neural network interpretability problem in the context of gene regulation. Here we describe a complementary way of approaching this problem. Our strategy is based on the observation that two large classes of biophysical models of cis-regulatory mechanisms can be expressed as deep neural networks in which nodes and weights have explicit physiochemical interpretations. We also demonstrate how such biophysical networks can be rapidly inferred, using modern deep learning frameworks, from the data produced by certain types of massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs). These results suggest a scalable strategy for using MPRAs to systematically characterize the biophysical basis of gene regulation in a wide range of biological contexts. They also highlight gene regulation as a promising venue for the development of scientifically interpretable approaches to deep learning.

Footnotes

  • tareen{at}cshl.edu

  • Presented at the 14th conference on Machine Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB 2019), Vancouver, Canada.

  • Presented at the 14th conference on Machine Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB 2019), Vancouver, Canada. Revised to add a link to code and to correct a typo in the King-Altman diagrams shown in Figure 3.

  • https://github.com/jbkinney/19_mlcb

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 08, 2020.
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Biophysical models of cis-regulation as interpretable neural networks
Ammar Tareen, Justin B. Kinney
bioRxiv 835942; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/835942
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Biophysical models of cis-regulation as interpretable neural networks
Ammar Tareen, Justin B. Kinney
bioRxiv 835942; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/835942

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