Abstract
The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) provides a conceptualization of phenotype information and a tool for the computational analysis of human diseases. It covers a wide range of phenotypic abnormalities encountered in human diseases and its terms (classes) are structured according to a directed acyclic graph. In this context the prediction of the phenotypic abnormalities associated to human genes is a key tool to stratify patients into disease subclasses that share a common biological or pathophisiological basis. Methods are being developed to predict the HPO terms that are associated for a given disease or disease gene, but most such methods adopt a simple ”flat” approach, that is they do not take into account the hierarchical relationships of the HPO, thus loosing important a priori information about HPO terms. In this contribution we propose a novel Hierarchical Top-Down (HTD) algorithm that associates a specific learner to each HPO term and then corrects the predictions according to the hierarchical structure of the underlying DAG. Genome-wide experimental results relative to a complex HPO DAG including more than 4000 HPO terms show that the proposed hierarchical-aware approach significantly improves predictions obtained with flat methods, especially in terms of precision/recall results.
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Valentini, G., Köhler, S., Re, M., Notaro, M., Robinson, P.N. (2015). Prediction of Human Gene - Phenotype Associations by Exploiting the Hierarchical Structure of the Human Phenotype Ontology. In: Ortuño, F., Rojas, I. (eds) Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering. IWBBIO 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9043. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16483-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16483-0_7
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