Metric Learning on Expression Data for Gene Function Prediction

Motivation Co-expression of two genes across different conditions is indicative of their involvement in the same biological process. However, using RNA-Seq datasets with many experimental conditions from diverse sources introduces batch effects and other artefacts that might obscure the real co-expression signal. Moreover, only a subset of experimental conditions is expected to be relevant for finding genes related to a particular Gene Ontology (GO) term. Therefore, we hypothesize that when the purpose is to find similar functioning genes that the co-expression of genes should not be determined on all samples but only on those samples informative for the GO term of interest. Results To address both types of effects, we developed MLC (Metric Learning for Co-expression), a fast algorithm that assigns a GO-term-specific weight to each expression sample. The goal is to obtain a weighted co-expression measure that is more suitable than the unweighted Pearson correlation for applying Guilt-By-Association-based function predictions. More specifically, if two genes are annotated with a given GO term, MLC tries to maximize their weighted co-expression, and, in addition, if one of them is not annotated with that term, the weighted co-expression is minimized. Our experiments on publicly available Arabidopsis thaliana RNA-Seq data demonstrate that MLC outperforms standard Pearson correlation in term-centric performance. Availability MLC is available as a Python package at www.github.com/stamakro/MLC Contact [email protected] Supplementary information Supplementary data are available online.