Density estimation for ordinal biological sequences and its applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Wei-Chia, Zhou, Juannan, McCandlish, David M.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chen, Wei-Chia
Zhou, Juannan
McCandlish, David M.
author_facet Chen, Wei-Chia
Zhou, Juannan
McCandlish, David M.
contents Biological sequences do not come at random. Instead, they appear with particular frequencies that reflect properties of the associated system or phenomenon. Knowing how biological sequences are distributed in sequence space is thus a natural first step toward understanding the underlying mechanisms. Here we propose a new method for inferring the probability distribution from which a sample of biological sequences were drawn for the case where the sequences are composed of elements that admit a natural ordering. Our method is based on Bayesian field theory, a physics-based machine learning approach, and can be regarded as a nonparametric extension of the traditional maximum entropy estimate. As an example, we use it to analyze the aneuploidy data pertaining to gliomas from The Cancer Genome Atlas project. In addition, we demonstrate two follow-up analyses that can be performed with the resulting probability distribution. One of them is to investigate the associations among the sequence sites. This provides us a way to infer the governing biological grammar. The other is to study the global geometry of the probability landscape, which allows us to look at the problem from an evolutionary point of view. It can be seen that this methodology enables us to learn from a sample of sequences about how a biological system or phenomenon in the real world works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11228
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Density estimation for ordinal biological sequences and its applications
Chen, Wei-Chia
Zhou, Juannan
McCandlish, David M.
Biological Physics
Quantitative Methods
Biological sequences do not come at random. Instead, they appear with particular frequencies that reflect properties of the associated system or phenomenon. Knowing how biological sequences are distributed in sequence space is thus a natural first step toward understanding the underlying mechanisms. Here we propose a new method for inferring the probability distribution from which a sample of biological sequences were drawn for the case where the sequences are composed of elements that admit a natural ordering. Our method is based on Bayesian field theory, a physics-based machine learning approach, and can be regarded as a nonparametric extension of the traditional maximum entropy estimate. As an example, we use it to analyze the aneuploidy data pertaining to gliomas from The Cancer Genome Atlas project. In addition, we demonstrate two follow-up analyses that can be performed with the resulting probability distribution. One of them is to investigate the associations among the sequence sites. This provides us a way to infer the governing biological grammar. The other is to study the global geometry of the probability landscape, which allows us to look at the problem from an evolutionary point of view. It can be seen that this methodology enables us to learn from a sample of sequences about how a biological system or phenomenon in the real world works.
title Density estimation for ordinal biological sequences and its applications
topic Biological Physics
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11228