GrapHiC: An integrative graph based approach for imputing missing Hi-C reads

Hi-C experiments allow researchers to study and understand the 3D genome organization and its regulatory function. Unfortunately, sequencing costs and technical constraints severely restrict access to high-quality Hi-C data for many cell types. Existing frameworks rely on a sparse Hi-C dataset or cheaper-to-acquire ChIP-seq data to predict Hi-C contact maps with high read coverage. However, these methods fail to generalize to sparse or cross-cell-type inputs because they do not account for the contributions of epigenomic features or the impact of the structural neighborhood in predicting Hi-C reads. We propose GrapHiC, which combines Hi-C and ChIP-seq in a graph representation, allowing more accurate embedding of structural and epigenomic features. Each node represents a binned genomic region, and we assign edge weights using the observed Hi-C reads. Additionally, we embed ChIP-seq and relative positional information as node attributes, allowing our representation to capture structural neighborhoods and the contributions of proteins and their modifications for predicting Hi-C reads. Our evaluations show that GrapHiC generalizes better than the current state-of-the-art on cross-cell-type settings and sparse Hi-C inputs. Moreover, we can utilize our framework to impute Hi-C reads even when no Hi-C contact map is available, thus making high-quality Hi-C data more accessible for many cell types. Availability https://github.com/rsinghlab/GrapHiC ACM Reference Format Ghulam Murtaza, Justin Wagner, Justin M. Zook, and Ritambhara Singh. 2018. GrapHiC: An integrative graph based approach for imputing missing Hi-C reads. In Proceedings of 22nd International Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics (BioKDD ‘23) . ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages. https://doi.org/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX