Aggregation Tool for Genomic Concepts (ATGC): A deep learning framework for somatic mutations and other sparse genomic measures

Deep learning can extract meaningful features from data given enough training examples. Large-scale genomic data are well suited for this class of machine learning algorithms; however, for many of these data the labels are at the level of the sample instead of at the level of the individual genomic measures. Conventional approaches to this data statically featurise and aggregate the measures separately from prediction. We propose to featurise, aggregate, and predict with a single trainable end-to-end model by turning to attention-based multiple instance learning. This allows for direct modelling of instance importance to sample-level classification in addition to trainable encoding strategies of genomic descriptions, such as mutations. We first demonstrate this approach by successfully solving synthetic tasks conventional approaches fail. Subsequently we applied the approach to somatic variants and achieved best-in-class performance when classifying tumour type or microsatellite status, while simultaneously providing an improved level of model explainability. Our results suggest that this framework could lead to biological insights and improve performance on tasks that aggregate information from sets of genomic data.