Constructing Ancestral Recombination Graphs through Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Raymond, Mélanie, Descary, Marie-Hélène, Beaulac, Cédric, Larribe, Fabrice
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909647806398464
author Raymond, Mélanie
Descary, Marie-Hélène
Beaulac, Cédric
Larribe, Fabrice
author_facet Raymond, Mélanie
Descary, Marie-Hélène
Beaulac, Cédric
Larribe, Fabrice
contents Over the years, many approaches have been proposed to build ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs), graphs used to represent the genetic relationship between individuals. Among these methods, many rely on the assumption that the most likely graph is among the shortest ones. In this paper, we propose a new approach to build short ARGs: Reinforcement Learning (RL). We exploit the similarities between finding the shortest path between a set of genetic sequences and their most recent common ancestor and finding the shortest path between the entrance and exit of a maze, a classic RL problem. In the maze problem, the learner, called the agent, must learn the directions to take in order to escape as quickly as possible, whereas in our problem, the agent must learn the actions to take between coalescence, mutation, and recombination in order to reach the most recent common ancestor as quickly as possible. Our results show that RL can be used to build ARGs as short as those built with a heuristic algorithm optimized to build short ARGs, and sometimes even shorter. Moreover, our method allows to build a distribution of short ARGs for a given sample, and can also generalize learning to new samples not used during the learning process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Constructing Ancestral Recombination Graphs through Reinforcement Learning
Raymond, Mélanie
Descary, Marie-Hélène
Beaulac, Cédric
Larribe, Fabrice
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Over the years, many approaches have been proposed to build ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs), graphs used to represent the genetic relationship between individuals. Among these methods, many rely on the assumption that the most likely graph is among the shortest ones. In this paper, we propose a new approach to build short ARGs: Reinforcement Learning (RL). We exploit the similarities between finding the shortest path between a set of genetic sequences and their most recent common ancestor and finding the shortest path between the entrance and exit of a maze, a classic RL problem. In the maze problem, the learner, called the agent, must learn the directions to take in order to escape as quickly as possible, whereas in our problem, the agent must learn the actions to take between coalescence, mutation, and recombination in order to reach the most recent common ancestor as quickly as possible. Our results show that RL can be used to build ARGs as short as those built with a heuristic algorithm optimized to build short ARGs, and sometimes even shorter. Moreover, our method allows to build a distribution of short ARGs for a given sample, and can also generalize learning to new samples not used during the learning process.
title Constructing Ancestral Recombination Graphs through Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12022