DisenTE: Sparse Pattern-Context Modeling for Interpretable Translation-Efficiency Matrix Completion

Abstract

Partially observed object-by-context matrices arise across data-rich science, where dominant object effects can obscure smaller but informative context-dependent variation. We study this problem in a translation-efficiency atlas of 9,494 5' UTRs across 78 cellular and tissue contexts. We present DisenTE, a sequence-conditioned neural model that combines separate sequence and context branches with a sparse low-rank pattern-context channel. Each module pairs a sequence-derived activation with context-specific deployment weights, forming a dictionary whose sequence and context components can be examined separately. Under five-fold within-panel entry masking, DisenTE achieves a UTR-centered residual Spearman correlation of 0.641 +/- 0.005, compared with 0.304 +/- 0.003 for the strongest reference model. The learned dictionary retains 11 of 20 candidate modules. CTM 6 has the largest overlap with an external TOP set and a cap-proximal pyrimidine pattern; CTMs 5 and 7 also overlap the set but have purine-containing consensuses. The evidence supports CTM 6 as a TOP sequence anchor and CTMs 5 and 7 as TOP-set-associated factors. On this dataset, DisenTE improves completion over the evaluated references and provides module-level summaries of its fitted context-dependent variation.