Accounting for population structure in deep learning models for genomic analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Deep learning methods are becoming increasingly popular for genotype analyses in recent years. In conventional genomic analyses, it is important to account for confounders to avoid biasing the results. Genetic relatedness is one of the most common confounders in conventional genomic analyses and there is a general consensus that it should be considered in the analysis to prevent distant levels of common ancestry from affecting the identification of causal variants. In contrast, genetic relatedness is not considered or ignored in many of the recently published deep learning models. OBJECTIVE: This study investigates whether the omission of genetic relatedness in deep learning models, common in recent literature, introduces confounding effects similar to those observed in conventional genomic analyses, particularly due to ancestry-related variants. METHODS: We developed and used a deep learning model to perform classifications based on single nucleotide polymorphism data from simulated and real-world datasets to examine whether population structure is confounding the model and potentially causing shortcut learning. RESULTS: The results of this study suggest that population structure may not significantly affect the performance of the deep learning model. However, explainable AI revealed notable differences in the focus between the confounded and unconfounded models when examining SNP feature importance. CONCLUSION: While population structure may not heavily affect model performance, it is important to reduce the models' capabilities of shortcut learning when designing deep learning models for analyzing genomic datasets, by using ancestry-related variants over potentially relevant biomarkers of the disease or disorder in question. The code used to perform these analyses can be found at: https://github.com/notTrivial/populationStructure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".