Phenotype-driven gene prioritization for rare diseases using graph convolution on heterogeneous networks
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: One of the major goals of genomic medicine is the identification of causal genomic variants in a patient and their relation to the observed clinical phenotypes. Prioritizing the genomic variants by considering only the genotype information usually identifies a few hundred potential variants. Narrowing it down further to find the causal disease genes and relating them to the observed clinical phenotypes remains a significant challenge, especially for rare diseases. METHODS: We propose a phenotype-driven gene prioritization approach using heterogeneous networks in the context of rare diseases. Towards this, we first built a heterogeneous network consisting of ontological associations as well as curated associations involving genes, diseases, phenotypes and pathways from multiple sources. Motivated by the recent progress in spectral graph convolutions, we developed a graph convolution based technique to infer new phenotype-gene associations from this initial set of associations. We included these inferred associations in the initial network and termed this integrated network HANRD (Heterogeneous Association Network for Rare Diseases). We validated this approach on 230 recently published rare disease clinical cases using the case phenotypes as input. RESULTS: When HANRD was queried with the case phenotypes as input, the causal genes were captured within Top-50 for more than 31% of the cases and within Top-200 for more than 56% of the cases. The results showed improved performance when compared to other state-of-the-art tools. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we showed that the heterogeneous network HANRD, consisting of curated, ontological and inferred associations, helped improve causal gene identification in rare diseases. HANRD allows future enhancements by supporting incorporation of new entity types and additional information sources.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it