UPDATED: Video Added from the Conference!
Introducing Zhi Yang > @zhiiiyang < presenting “Hierarchical Topic Modeling in Cancer Research”.
Topic models have been widely applied to extract topics from various range of documents or collections of texts, i.e., online customers reviews, medical records, scientific
journals, legal documents, books and etc. Its application facilitates the process for us to quickly understand the most featured and commonly shared information embedded texts without actually reading through the entire collection. In addition, topic models also allow us to access the contribution of each topic and its representations across different documents. Human genomes have been exposed to an assortment of mutational processes by contributing to unique patterns of somatic mutations. What would happen if we apply the same concept to the somatic mutations obtained from the cancer patients and look for “topics” of mutations? What would these “topics” tell us about the most important information for our health, genetic, risk factors for cancer and
something more that slip under the radar?
Shiraishi et al’s have proposed a topic model targeted for somatic mutations to capture the characteristics and burdens contributed by mutational processes. By closely examining the burdens, we’d like to compare them across different categories, say, for example, time, cancer subtype, ethnicity, smoking history, etc. Then, we’d like to develop the statistical machinery to infer the difference between the mutational profiles across different categories and associate the variations with the know exposures. This tool is potentially useful for identifying novel and existing mutational processes and correlating them with risk factors in which later can be used to monitor any treatment effects in personalized medicine and targeted therapy.
Read the publication here at biorxiv and come check out Zhi Yang’s talk at ML4ALL happening April 28th-30th in amazing Portland, Oregon! Get your tickets to attend here. For the schedule, our excellent sponsors docs for the conference, check out the ML4ALL Conference Site!
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