After having followed this course, a student should have an overview of basic pattern recognition techniques and be able to recognize what method is most applicable to classification problems (s)he encounters in bioinformatics applications.
Date: March 23-27, 2015
Target audience: The course is aimed at PhD students with a background in bioinformatics, computer science or a related field; a working knowledge of basic statistics and linear algebra is assumed. Preparation material on statistics and linear algebra will be distributed before the course, to be studied by students missing the required background.
Program: Many problems in bioinformatics require classification: prediction of the class to which a certain object (i.e. a gene, protein, cell, patient, ?) belongs. This calls for algorithms that can assign the most likely label (discrete output) to an object, given one or more measurements on that object. For most interesting problems, the underlying physics are too complex to explicitly formulate such an algorithm. In such cases, a machine learning approach is taken: an algorithm is constructed, with parameters that are tuned based on an available dataset of training examples. The algorithm should predict the labels for these examples as well as possible, yet still generalize, i.e. perform well on objects not seen before. Some examples of classification problems in bioinformatics are gene finding (sequence in, gene presence out), diagnostics (microarray data in, diagnosis out), data integration (measurements in, probability of interaction out), etc.
In this course, we will introduce basic techniques from the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning to solve such problems. We will introduce the pattern recognition pipeline: measuring, feature extraction and selection, classification and evaluation. The first two days will introduce the basic classification problem and a number of classic approaches to solve it. Next, methods for selecting or extracting informative features from a large set of measurements will be introduced. This will be followed by an introduction to a number of unsupervised techniques, that allow to find natural groupings or probabilistic descriptions of (unlabeled) data. The course will end with a cursory introduction to a number of intricate classifiers, artificial neural networks and support vector machines, and an overview of approaches to solve the generalization problem. For a large number of the methods discussed, we will turn to recent bioinformatics literature for examples.
Course website: http://biosb.nl/education/course-portfolio/pattern-recognition/
