Theofanis Karaletsos

RiboDiff: Detecting Changes of mRNA Translation Efficiency from Ribosome Footprints

Motivation: Deep sequencing based ribosome footprint profiling can provide novel insights into the regulatory mechanisms of protein translation. However, the observed ribosome profile is fundamentally confounded by transcriptional activity. In order to decipher principles of translation regulation, tools that can reliably detect changes in translation efficiency in case–control studies are needed. Results: We present a statistical framework and an analysis tool, RiboDiff, to detect genes with changes in translation efficiency across experimental treatments. RiboDiff uses generalized linear models to estimate the over-dispersion of RNA-Seq and ribosome profiling measurements separately, and performs a statistical test for differential translation efficiency using both mRNA abundance and ribosome occupancy. Availability and Implementation: RiboDiff webpage http://bioweb.me/ribodiff. Source code including scripts for preprocessing the FASTQ data are available at http://github.com/ratschlab/ribodiff. Contacts: zhongy@cbio.mskcc.org or raetsch@inf.ethz.ch Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

An Empirical Analysis of Topic Modeling for Mining Cancer Clinical Notes

Using a variety of techniques including Topic Modeling, Principal Component Analysis and Bi-clustering, we explore electronic patient records in the form of unstructured clinical notes and genetic mutation test results. Our ultimate goal is to gain insight into a unique body of clinical data, specifically regarding the topics discussed within the note content and relationships between patient clinical notes and their underlying genetics.

Conditional Similarity Networks

What makes images similar? To measure the similarity between images, they are typically embedded in a feature-vector space, in which their distance preserve the relative dissimilarity. However, when learning such similarity embeddings the simplifying assumption is commonly made that images are only compared to one unique measure of similarity. A main reason for this is that contradicting notions of similarities cannot be captured in a single space. To address this shortcoming, we propose Conditional Similarity Networks (CSNs) that learn embeddings differentiated into semantically distinct subspaces that capture the different notions of similarities. CSNs jointly learn a disentangled embedding where features for different similarities are encoded in separate dimensions as well as masks that select and reweight relevant dimensions to induce a subspace that encodes a specific similarity notion. We show that our approach learns interpretable image representations with visually relevant semantic subspaces. Further, when evaluating on triplet questions from multiple similarity notions our model even outperforms the accuracy obtained by training individual specialized networks for each notion separately.