Varmole: A biologically drop-connect deep neural network model for prioritizing disease risk variants and genes

Population studies such as GWAS have identified a variety of genomic variants associated with human diseases. To further understand potential mechanisms of disease variants, recent statistical methods associate functional omic data (e.g., gene expression) with genotype and phenotype and link variants to individual genes. However, how to interpret molecular mechanisms from such associations, especially across omics is still challenging. To address this, we develop an interpretable deep learning method, Varmole to simultaneously reveal genomic functions and mechanisms while predicting phenotype from genotype. In particular, Varmole embeds multi-omic networks into a deep neural network architecture and prioritizes variants, genes and regulatory linkages via drop-connect without needing prior feature selections. Varmole is available as a Python package on GitHub at https://github.com/daifengwanglab/Varmole.