Probabilistic models are becoming increasingly important in analysing the huge amount of data being produced by large-scale DNA-sequencing efforts such as the Human Genome Project. For example, hidden Markov models are used for analysing biological sequences, linguistic-grammar-based probabilistic models for identifying RNA secondary structure, and probabilistic evolutionary models for inferring phylogenies of sequences from different organisms. This book gives a unified, up-to-date and self-contained account, with a Bayesian slant, of such methods, and more generally to probabilistic methods of sequence analysis. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, it aims to be accessible to molecular biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians with no formal knowledge of the other fields, and at the same time present the state-of-the-art in this new and highly important field.
Supervised sequence labelling is a vital area of machine learning, encompassing tasks such as speech, handwriting and gesture recognition, protein secondary structure prediction and part-of-speech tagging. Recurrent neural networks are powerful sequence learning tools—robust to input noise and distortion, able to exploit long-range contextual information—that would seem ideally suited to such problems. However their role in large-scale sequence labelling systems has so far been auxiliary. The goal of this book is a complete framework for classifying and transcribing sequential data with recurrent neural networks only. Three main innovations are introduced in order to realise this goal. Firstly, the connectionist temporal classification output layer allows the framework to be trained with unsegmented target sequences, such as phoneme-level speech transcriptions; this is in contrast to previous connectionist approaches, which were dependent on error-prone prior segmentation. Secondly, multidimensional recurrent neural networks extend the framework in a natural way to data with more than one spatio-temporal dimension, such as images and videos. Thirdly, the use of hierarchical subsampling makes it feasible to apply the framework to very large or high resolution sequences, such as raw audio or video. Experimental validation is provided by state-of-the-art results in speech and handwriting recognition.
Bioinformatics, a field devoted to the interpretation and analysis of biological data using computational techniques, has evolved tremendously in recent years due to the explosive growth of biological information generated by the scientific community. Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies that work synergistically and provides, in one form or another, flexible information processing capabilities for handling real-life ambiguous situations. Several research articles dealing with the application of soft computing tools to bioinformatics have been published in the recent past; however, they are scattered in different journals, conference proceedings and technical reports, thus causing inconvenience to readers, students and researchers. This book, unique in its nature, is aimed at providing a treatise in a unified framework, with both theoretical and experimental results, describing the basic principles of soft computing and demonstrating the various ways in which they can be used for analyzing biological data in an efficient manner. Interesting research articles from eminent scientists around the world are brought together in a systematic way such that the reader will be able to understand the issues and challenges in this domain, the existing ways of tackling them, recent trends, and future directions. This book is the first of its kind to bring together two important research areas, soft computing and bioinformatics, in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques in the former can be used for efficiently solving several problems in the latter. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Bioinformatics: Mining the Massive Data from High Throughput Genomics Experiments (160 KB). Contents: Overview: Bioinformatics: Mining the Massive Data from High Throughput Genomics Experiments (H Tang & S Kim); An Introduction to Soft Computing (A Konar & S Das); Biological Sequence and Structure Analysis: Reconstructing Phylogenies with Memetic Algorithms and Branch-and-Bound (J E Gallardo et al.); Classification of RNA Sequences with Support Vector Machines (J T L Wang & X Wu); Beyond String Algorithms: Protein Sequence Analysis Using Wavelet Transforms (A Krishnan & K-B Li); Filtering Protein Surface Motifs Using Negative Instances of Active Sites Candidates (N L Shrestha & T Ohkawa); Distill: A Machine Learning Approach to Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction (G Pollastri et al.); In Silico Design of Ligands Using Properties of Target Active Sites (S Bandyopadhyay et al.); Gene Expression and Microarray Data Analysis: Inferring Regulations in a Genomic Network from Gene Expression Profiles (N Noman & H Iba); A Reliable Classification of Gene Clusters for Cancer Samples Using a Hybrid Multi-Objective Evolutionary Procedure (K Deb et al.); Feature Selection for Cancer Classification Using Ant Colony Optimization and Support Vector Machines (A Gupta et al.); Sophisticated Methods for Cancer Classification Using Microarray Data (S-B Cho & H-S Park); Multiobjective Evolutionary Approach to Fuzzy Clustering of Microarray Data (A Mukhopadhyay et al.). Readership: Graduate students and researchers in computer science, bioinformatics, computational and molecular biology, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, electrical engineering, system science; researchers in pharmaceutical industries.
• Assumes no background in statistics or computers • Covers most major types of molecular biological data • Covers the statistical and machine learning concepts of most practical utility (P-values, clustering, regression, regularization and classification) • Intended for graduate students beginning careers in molecular biology, systems biology, bioengineering and genetics
An unprecedented wealth of data is being generated by genome sequencing projects and other experimental efforts to determine the structure and function of biological molecules. The demands and opportunities for interpreting these data are expanding more than ever. Biotechnology, pharmacology, and medicine will be particularly affected by the new results and the increased understanding of life at the molecular level. Bioinformatics is the development and application of computer methods for analysis, interpretation, and prediction, as well as for the design of experiments. It has emerged as a strategic frontier between biology and computer science. Machine learning approaches (e.g., neural networks, hidden Markov models, and belief networks) are ideally suited for areas where there is a lot of data but little theory—and this is exactly the situation in molecular biology. As with its predecessor, statistical model fitting, the goal in machine learning is to extract useful information from a body of data by building good probabilistic models. The particular twist behind machine learning, however, is to automate the process as much as possible. In this book, Pierre Baldi and Soren Brunak present the key machine learning approaches and apply them to the computational problems encountered in the analysis of biological data. The book is aimed at two types of researchers and students. First are the biologists and biochemists who need to understand new data-driven algorithms, such as neural networks and hidden Markov models, in the context of biological sequences and their molecular structure and function. Second are those with a primary background in physics, mathematics, statistics, or computer science who need to know more about specific applications in molecular biology.
An introduction to machine learning methods and their applications to problems in bioinformatics Machine learning techniques are increasingly being used to address problems in computational biology and bioinformatics. Novel computational techniques to analyze high throughput data in the form of sequences, gene and protein expressions, pathways, and images are becoming vital for understanding diseases and future drug discovery. Machine learning techniques such as Markov models, support vector machines, neural networks, and graphical models have been successful in analyzing life science data because of their capabilities in handling randomness and uncertainty of data noise and in generalization. From an internationally recognized panel of prominent researchers in the field, Machine Learning in Bioinformatics compiles recent approaches in machine learning methods and their applications in addressing contemporary problems in bioinformatics. Coverage includes: feature selection for genomic and proteomic data mining; comparing variable selection methods in gene selection and classification of microarray data; fuzzy gene mining; sequence-based prediction of residue-level properties in proteins; probabilistic methods for long-range features in biosequences; and much more. Machine Learning in Bioinformatics is an indispensable resource for computer scientists, engineers, biologists, mathematicians, researchers, clinicians, physicians, and medical informaticists. It is also a valuable reference text for computer science, engineering, and biology courses at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels.
