Discovering pathway and cell-type signatures in transcriptomic compendia with machine learning

Pathway and cell-type signatures are patterns present in transcriptome data that are associated with biological processes or phenotypic consequences. These signatures result from specific cell-type and pathway expression, but can require large transcriptomic compendia to detect. Machine learning techniques can be powerful tools in a practitioner’s toolkit for signature discovery through their ability to provide accurate and interpretable results. In the following review, we discuss various machine learning applications to extract pathway and cell-type signatures from transcriptomic compendia. We focus on the biological motivations and interpretation for both supervised and unsupervised learning approaches in this setting. We consider recent advances, including deep learning, and their applications to expanding bulk and single cell RNA data. As data and compute resources increase, opportunities for machine learning to aid in revealing biological signatures will continue to grow.