Genome Biology (Feb 2019)

NCBoost classifies pathogenic non-coding variants in Mendelian diseases through supervised learning on purifying selection signals in humans

  • Barthélémy Caron,
  • Yufei Luo,
  • Antonio Rausell

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1634-2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 20, no. 1
pp. 1 – 22

Abstract

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Abstract State-of-the-art methods assessing pathogenic non-coding variants have mostly been characterized on common disease-associated polymorphisms, yet with modest accuracy and strong positional biases. In this study, we curated 737 high-confidence pathogenic non-coding variants associated with monogenic Mendelian diseases. In addition to interspecies conservation, a comprehensive set of recent and ongoing purifying selection signals in humans is explored, accounting for lineage-specific regulatory elements. Supervised learning using gradient tree boosting on such features achieves a high predictive performance and overcomes positional bias. NCBoost performs consistently across diverse learning and independent testing data sets and outperforms other existing reference methods.

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