arXiv subjects

Ragnhild Laursen

Publications and source records attributed to Ragnhild Laursen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Integrating opportunities and parametrized signatures for improved mutational processes estimation in extended sequence contexts

Mutational signatures describe the pattern of mutations over the different mutation types. Each mutation type is determined by a base substitution and the flanking nucleotides to the left and right of that base substitution. Due to the widespread interest in mutational signatures, several efforts have been devoted to the development of methods for robust and stable signature estimation. Here, we combine various extensions of the standard framework to estimate mutational signatures. These extensions include (a) incorporating opportunities to the analysis, (b) allowing for extended sequence contexts, (c) using the Negative Binomial model, and (d) parametrizing the signatures. We show that the combination of these four extensions gives very robust and reliable mutational signatures. In particular, we highlight the importance of including mutational opportunities and parametrizing the signatures when the mutation types describe an extended sequence context with two or three flanking nucleotides to each side of the base substitution.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2022

Model selection and robust inference of mutational signatures using Negative Binomial non-negative matrix factorization

The spectrum of mutations in a collection of cancer genomes can be described by a mixture of a few mutational signatures. The mutational signatures can be found using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). To extract the mutational signatures we have to assume a distribution for the observed mutational counts and a number of mutational signatures. In most applications, the mutational counts are assumed to be Poisson distributed, and the rank is chosen by comparing the fit of several models with the same underlying distribution and different values for the rank using classical model selection procedures. However, the counts are often overdispersed, and thus the Negative Binomial distribution is more appropriate. We propose a Negative Binomial NMF with a patient specific dispersion parameter to capture the variation across patients. We also introduce a novel model selection procedure inspired by cross-validation to determine the number of signatures. Using simulations, we study the influence of the distributional assumption on our method together with other classical model selection procedures and we show that our model selection procedure is more robust at determining the correct number of signatures under model misspecification. We also show that our model selection procedure is more accurate than state-of-the-art methods for finding the true number of signatures. Other methods are highly overestimating the number of signatures when overdispersion is present. We apply our proposed analysis on a wide range of simulated data and on two real data sets from breast and prostate cancer patients. The code for our model selection procedure and negative binomial NMF is available in the R package SigMoS and can be found at https://github.com/MartaPelizzola/SigMoS.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

A flexible model-based framework for robust estimation of mutational signatures

Somatic mutations in cancer can be viewed as a mixture distribution of several mutational signatures, which can be inferred using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Mutational signatures have previously been parametrized using either simple mono-nucleotide interaction models or general tri-nucleotide interaction models. We describe a flexible and novel framework for identifying biologically plausible parametrizations of mutational signatures, and in particular for estimating di-nucleotide interaction models. The estimation procedure is based on the expectation--maximization (EM) algorithm and regression in the log-linear quasi--Poisson model. We show that di-nucleotide interaction signatures are statistically stable and sufficiently complex to fit the mutational patterns. Di-nucleotide interaction signatures often strike the right balance between appropriately fitting the data and avoiding over-fitting. They provide a better fit to data and are biologically more plausible than mono-nucleotide interaction signatures, and the parametrization is more stable than the parameter-rich tri-nucleotide interaction signatures. We illustrate our framework on three data sets of somatic mutation counts from cancer patients.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2021

A sampling algorithm to compute the set of feasible solutions for non-negative matrix factorization with an arbitrary rank

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a useful method to extract features from multivariate data, but an important and sometimes neglected concern is that NMF can result in non-unique solutions. Often, there exist a Set of Feasible Solutions (SFS), which makes it more difficult to interpret the factorization. This problem is especially ignored in cancer genomics, where NMF is used to infer information about the mutational processes present in the evolution of cancer. In this paper the extent of non-uniqueness is investigated for two mutational counts data, and a new sampling algorithm, that can find the SFS, is introduced. Our sampling algorithm is easy to implement and applies to an arbitrary rank of NMF. This is in contrast to state of the art, where the NMF rank must be smaller than or equal to four. For lower ranks we show that our algorithm performs similarly to the polygon inflation algorithm that is developed in relations to chemometrics. Furthermore, we show how the size of the SFS can have a high influence on the appearing variability of a solution. Our sampling algorithm is implemented in an R package \textbf{SFS} (\url{https://github.com/ragnhildlaursen/SFS}).

stat.AP↗