On minimizers and convolutional filters: theoretical connections and applications to genome analysis

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Yu, Yun William
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913210352795648
author Yu, Yun William
author_facet Yu, Yun William
contents Minimizers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two quite distinct popular techniques that have both been employed to analyze categorical biological sequences. At face value, the methods seem entirely dissimilar. Minimizers use min-wise hashing on a rolling window to extract a single important k-mer feature per window. CNNs start with a wide array of randomly initialized convolutional filters, paired with a pooling operation, and then multiple additional neural layers to learn both the filters themselves and how they can be used to classify the sequence. Here, our main result is a careful mathematical analysis of hash function properties showing that for sequences over a categorical alphabet, random Gaussian initialization of convolutional filters with max-pooling is equivalent to choosing a minimizer ordering such that selected k-mers are (in Hamming distance) far from the k-mers within the sequence but close to other minimizers. In empirical experiments, we find that this property manifests as decreased density in repetitive regions, both in simulation and on real human telomeres. We additionally train from scratch a CNN embedding of synthetic short-reads from the SARS-CoV-2 genome into 3D Euclidean space that locally recapitulates the linear sequence distance of the read origins, a modest step towards building a deep learning assembler, though it is at present too slow to be practical. In total, this manuscript provides a partial explanation for the effectiveness of CNNs in categorical sequence analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2111_08452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On minimizers and convolutional filters: theoretical connections and applications to genome analysis
Yu, Yun William
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Genomics
Minimizers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two quite distinct popular techniques that have both been employed to analyze categorical biological sequences. At face value, the methods seem entirely dissimilar. Minimizers use min-wise hashing on a rolling window to extract a single important k-mer feature per window. CNNs start with a wide array of randomly initialized convolutional filters, paired with a pooling operation, and then multiple additional neural layers to learn both the filters themselves and how they can be used to classify the sequence. Here, our main result is a careful mathematical analysis of hash function properties showing that for sequences over a categorical alphabet, random Gaussian initialization of convolutional filters with max-pooling is equivalent to choosing a minimizer ordering such that selected k-mers are (in Hamming distance) far from the k-mers within the sequence but close to other minimizers. In empirical experiments, we find that this property manifests as decreased density in repetitive regions, both in simulation and on real human telomeres. We additionally train from scratch a CNN embedding of synthetic short-reads from the SARS-CoV-2 genome into 3D Euclidean space that locally recapitulates the linear sequence distance of the read origins, a modest step towards building a deep learning assembler, though it is at present too slow to be practical. In total, this manuscript provides a partial explanation for the effectiveness of CNNs in categorical sequence analysis.
title On minimizers and convolutional filters: theoretical connections and applications to genome analysis
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08452