用随机数据模拟通路信息,发现其效果不输真实生物通路。
Sparsity is All You Need: Rethinking Biological Pathway-Informed Approaches in Deep Learning
- 用随机基因排列替代真实通路数据,测试模型性能
- 15个模型中3个随机版本表现更优,多数结果相当
- 为评估通路模型提供可复现的基准方法
生物通路引导的神经网络通常利用通路注释提升生物医学预测性能。我们假设通路整合的优势并非源于生物学意义,而是因其引入的稀疏性。通过对所有相关通路基神经网络模型的全面分析,我们筛选出源代码公开的方法进行对比。结果表明,在不同指标和数据集上,基于随机信息的模型表现与生物通路引导模型相当;其中3个模型的随机版本甚至更优。此外,通路模型在可解释性方面并无明显优势,随机模型仍能识别出相关疾病生物标志物。研究提示当前通路注释可能噪声过多或未被有效利用。因此我们提出一种通用方法,可应用于不同领域,作为系统比较新型通路引导模型与其随机对照模型的基准。该方法帮助研究者严格判断性能提升是否源自生物学洞见。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Biologically-informed neural networks typically leverage pathway annotations to enhance performance in biomedical applications. We hypothesized that the benefits of pathway integration does not arise from its biological relevance, but rather from the sparsity it introduces. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of all relevant pathway-based neural network models for predictive tasks, critically evaluating each study's contributions. From this review, we curated a subset of methods for which the source code was publicly available. The comparison of the biologically informed state-of-the-art deep learning models and their randomized counterparts showed that models based on randomized information performed equally well as biologically informed ones across different metrics and datasets. Notably, in 3 out of the 15 analyzed models, the randomized versions even outperformed their biologically informed counterparts. Moreover, pathway-informed models did not show any clear advantage in interpretability, as randomized models were still able to identify relevant disease biomarkers despite lacking explicit pathway information. Our findings suggest that pathway annotations may be too noisy or inadequately explored by current methods. Therefore, we propose a methodology that can be applied to different domains and can serve as a robust benchmark for systematically comparing novel pathway-informed models against their randomized counterparts. This approach enables researchers to rigorously determine whether observed performance improvements can be attributed to biological insights.
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