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Leo Lahti

Publications and source records attributed to Leo Lahti.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Probabilistic analysis of the human transcriptome with side information

Understanding functional organization of genetic information is a major challenge in modern biology. Following the initial publication of the human genome sequence in 2001, advances in high-throughput measurement technologies and efficient sharing of research material through community databases have opened up new views to the study of living organisms and the structure of life. In this thesis, novel computational strategies have been developed to investigate a key functional layer of genetic information, the human transcriptome, which regulates the function of living cells through protein synthesis. The key contributions of the thesis are general exploratory tools for high-throughput data analysis that have provided new insights to cell-biological networks, cancer mechanisms and other aspects of genome function. A central challenge in functional genomics is that high-dimensional genomic observations are associated with high levels of complex and largely unknown sources of variation. By combining statistical evidence across multiple measurement sources and the wealth of background information in genomic data repositories it has been possible to solve some the uncertainties associated with individual observations and to identify functional mechanisms that could not be detected based on individual measurement sources. Statistical learning and probabilistic models provide a natural framework for such modeling tasks. Open source implementations of the key methodological contributions have been released to facilitate further adoption of the developed methods by the research community.

stat.ML↗

Dependency detection with similarity constraints

Unsupervised two-view learning, or detection of dependencies between two paired data sets, is typically done by some variant of canonical correlation analysis (CCA). CCA searches for a linear projection for each view, such that the correlations between the projections are maximized. The solution is invariant to any linear transformation of either or both of the views; for tasks with small sample size such flexibility implies overfitting, which is even worse for more flexible nonparametric or kernel-based dependency discovery methods. We develop variants which reduce the degrees of freedom by assuming constraints on similarity of the projections in the two views. A particular example is provided by a cancer gene discovery application where chromosomal distance affects the dependencies between gene copy number and activity levels. Similarity constraints are shown to improve detection performance of known cancer genes.

stat.ML↗