LOCO-EPI: Leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) as a benchmarking paradigm for deep learning based prediction of enhancer-promoter interactions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Tahir, Muhammad, Khan, Shehroz S., Davie, James, Yamanaka, Soichiro, Ashraf, Ahmed
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Tahir, Muhammad
Khan, Shehroz S.
Davie, James
Yamanaka, Soichiro
Ashraf, Ahmed
author_facet Tahir, Muhammad
Khan, Shehroz S.
Davie, James
Yamanaka, Soichiro
Ashraf, Ahmed
contents In mammalian and vertebrate genomes, the promoter regions of the gene and their distal enhancers may be located millions of base-pairs from each other, while a promoter may not interact with the closest enhancer. Since base-pair proximity is not a good indicator of these interactions, there is considerable work toward developing methods for predicting Enhancer-Promoter Interactions (EPI). Several machine learning methods have reported increasingly higher accuracies for predicting EPI. Typically, these approaches randomly split the dataset of Enhancer-Promoter (EP) pairs into training and testing subsets followed by model training. However, the aforementioned random splitting causes information leakage by assigning EP pairs from the same genomic region to both testing and training sets, leading to performance overestimation. In this paper we propose to use a more thorough training and testing paradigm i.e., Leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) cross-validation for EPI-prediction. We demonstrate that a deep learning algorithm, which gives higher accuracies when trained and tested on random-splitting setting, drops drastically in performance under LOCO setting, confirming overestimation of performance. We further propose a novel hybrid deep neural network for EPI-prediction that fuses k-mer features of the nucleotide sequence. We show that the hybrid architecture performs significantly better in the LOCO setting, demonstrating it can learn more generalizable aspects of EP interactions. With this paper we are also releasing the LOCO splitting-based EPI dataset. Research data is available in this public repository: https://github.com/malikmtahir/EPI
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LOCO-EPI: Leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) as a benchmarking paradigm for deep learning based prediction of enhancer-promoter interactions
Tahir, Muhammad
Khan, Shehroz S.
Davie, James
Yamanaka, Soichiro
Ashraf, Ahmed
Machine Learning
Genomics
In mammalian and vertebrate genomes, the promoter regions of the gene and their distal enhancers may be located millions of base-pairs from each other, while a promoter may not interact with the closest enhancer. Since base-pair proximity is not a good indicator of these interactions, there is considerable work toward developing methods for predicting Enhancer-Promoter Interactions (EPI). Several machine learning methods have reported increasingly higher accuracies for predicting EPI. Typically, these approaches randomly split the dataset of Enhancer-Promoter (EP) pairs into training and testing subsets followed by model training. However, the aforementioned random splitting causes information leakage by assigning EP pairs from the same genomic region to both testing and training sets, leading to performance overestimation. In this paper we propose to use a more thorough training and testing paradigm i.e., Leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) cross-validation for EPI-prediction. We demonstrate that a deep learning algorithm, which gives higher accuracies when trained and tested on random-splitting setting, drops drastically in performance under LOCO setting, confirming overestimation of performance. We further propose a novel hybrid deep neural network for EPI-prediction that fuses k-mer features of the nucleotide sequence. We show that the hybrid architecture performs significantly better in the LOCO setting, demonstrating it can learn more generalizable aspects of EP interactions. With this paper we are also releasing the LOCO splitting-based EPI dataset. Research data is available in this public repository: https://github.com/malikmtahir/EPI
title LOCO-EPI: Leave-one-chromosome-out (LOCO) as a benchmarking paradigm for deep learning based prediction of enhancer-promoter interactions
topic Machine Learning
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00306