Fordham InformatICS Seminar

From heterogeneity in cancer to heterogeneity in bioinformatics tools

Speaker: Prof. Yuval Kluger, Yale University
Date: April 10, 2014
Time: 3:00-4:00pm
Location: Keating 312

Abstract

Topic 1: Revealing the clonal composition of a single tumor is essential for identifying cell subpopulations with metastatic potential in primary tumors or with resistance to therapies in metastatic tumors. Sequencing technologies provide only an overview of the aggregate of numerous cells. Computational approaches to de-mix a collective signal composed of the aberrations of a mixed cell population of a tumor sample into its individual components are just starting to emerge. We propose an evolutionary framework for deconvolving data from a single genome-wide experiment to infer the composition, abundance and evolutionary paths of the underlying cell subpopulations of a tumor.

Topic 2: A key challenge in bioinformatics is how to rank and combine the possibly conflicting predictions of several algorithms, of unknown reliability. We provide new mathematical insights of striking conceptual simplicity that explain mutual relationships between independent classifiers/algorithms.These insights enable the design of efficient, robust and reliable methods to rank the classifiers performances and construct improved predictions in the absence of ground truth.

Bio