Re:Deep learning can debug biology
by karmel on Sunday October 16, 2016 @12:11AM
(#12716839)
It might be the lack of detail in the piece, but it's unclear to me why this isn't a hammer to kill a fly-- that is, why wouldn't a much simpler peak-finding algorithm be appropriate here? What is the NN doing that's more than just peak finding over many molecules? Is there some interdependency that I am missing, or is this just signal-processing over millions of independent traces?
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As far as I understand, NN is used here to find patterns which discriminate between sample cohorts (healthy vs disease). Peak finding gives you a list of peaks, but it doesn't tell you which of them discriminate between cohorts.