GPO-VAE: Modeling Explainable Gene Perturbation Responses utilizing GRN-Aligned Parameter Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Baek, Seungheun, Park, Soyon, Chok, Yan Ting, Gim, Mogan, Kang, Jaewoo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Baek, Seungheun
Park, Soyon
Chok, Yan Ting
Gim, Mogan
Kang, Jaewoo
author_facet Baek, Seungheun
Park, Soyon
Chok, Yan Ting
Gim, Mogan
Kang, Jaewoo
contents Motivation: Predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations is essential for understanding biological systems and developing targeted therapeutic strategies. While variational autoencoders (VAEs) have shown promise in modeling perturbation responses, their limited explainability poses a significant challenge, as the learned features often lack clear biological meaning. Nevertheless, model explainability is one of the most important aspects in the realm of biological AI. One of the most effective ways to achieve explainability is incorporating the concept of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) in designing deep learning models such as VAEs. GRNs elicit the underlying causal relationships between genes and are capable of explaining the transcriptional responses caused by genetic perturbation treatments. Results: We propose GPO-VAE, an explainable VAE enhanced by GRN-aligned Parameter Optimization that explicitly models gene regulatory networks in the latent space. Our key approach is to optimize the learnable parameters related to latent perturbation effects towards GRN-aligned explainability. Experimental results on perturbation prediction show our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting transcriptional responses across multiple benchmark datasets. Furthermore, additional results on evaluating the GRN inference task reveal our model's ability to generate meaningful GRNs compared to other methods. According to qualitative analysis, GPO-VAE posseses the ability to construct biologically explainable GRNs that align with experimentally validated regulatory pathways. GPO-VAE is available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/GPO-VAE
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_18973
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GPO-VAE: Modeling Explainable Gene Perturbation Responses utilizing GRN-Aligned Parameter Optimization
Baek, Seungheun
Park, Soyon
Chok, Yan Ting
Gim, Mogan
Kang, Jaewoo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Motivation: Predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations is essential for understanding biological systems and developing targeted therapeutic strategies. While variational autoencoders (VAEs) have shown promise in modeling perturbation responses, their limited explainability poses a significant challenge, as the learned features often lack clear biological meaning. Nevertheless, model explainability is one of the most important aspects in the realm of biological AI. One of the most effective ways to achieve explainability is incorporating the concept of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) in designing deep learning models such as VAEs. GRNs elicit the underlying causal relationships between genes and are capable of explaining the transcriptional responses caused by genetic perturbation treatments. Results: We propose GPO-VAE, an explainable VAE enhanced by GRN-aligned Parameter Optimization that explicitly models gene regulatory networks in the latent space. Our key approach is to optimize the learnable parameters related to latent perturbation effects towards GRN-aligned explainability. Experimental results on perturbation prediction show our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting transcriptional responses across multiple benchmark datasets. Furthermore, additional results on evaluating the GRN inference task reveal our model's ability to generate meaningful GRNs compared to other methods. According to qualitative analysis, GPO-VAE posseses the ability to construct biologically explainable GRNs that align with experimentally validated regulatory pathways. GPO-VAE is available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/GPO-VAE
title GPO-VAE: Modeling Explainable Gene Perturbation Responses utilizing GRN-Aligned Parameter Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18973