Professor Benjamin Haibe-Kains from the University of Toronto, Canada, will give a CIL doctoral course on "Biomarker discovery from large pharmacogenomics datasets".
The course will take place on Monday March 05, 2018 from 10.00 to 12.30 and 14.00 to 16.30 in Shannon Seminar Room Place du Levant 3, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve.
REGISTRATION
Free but *requested*. Please consult:
http://sites.uclouvain.be/doctoralschool-cil/index.php? page=agenda

TITLE:
Biomarker discovery from large pharmacogenomics datasets

ABSTRACT:
Lecture:
This course will focus on the challenges encountered when applying machine learning techniques in complex, high dimensional biological data. In particular, we will focus on biomarker discovery from pharmacogenomic data, which consists of developing predictors of response of cancer cell lines to chemical compounds based on their genomic features. From a methodological viewpoint, biomarker discovery is strongly linked to variable selection, through methods such as Supervised Learning with sparsity inducing norms (LASSO, Elastic Net, ...) or techniques accounting for the complex correlation structure of biological features (groupLASSO or MRMR). Yet, the main focus of this talk will be on the sound use of such methods in a pharmacogenomics context, their validation and correct interpretation of the produced results. I will first discuss how to assess the quality of both the input and output data. I will further present our recent findings illustrating the importance of unified analytical platforms, data and code sharing in bioinformatics and biomedical research, as the data generation process becomes increasingly complex and requires high level of replication to achieve robust results. This is particularly relevant as our portfolio of machine learning techniques is ever enlarging, with its set of hyperparameters that can be tuning in a multitude of ways, increasing the risk of overfitting when developing multivariate predictors of drug response.

Practical session:
Bring your own laptop and install the R/Bioconductor PharmacoGx package (https://bioconductor.org/packages/PharmacoGx/) and its dependencies. Run the following commands to download a local version of two pharmacogenomic datasets
> GDSC <- downloadPSet("GDSC")
> CCLE <- downloadPSet("CCLE")

VENUE:
Maxwell Building
Shannon Seminar Room (First Floor)
Place du Levant, 3
B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/SB5YfdM4zaB2
External visitors are welcome to park on the Rédimé Parking (middle - right of the map) https://cdn.uclouvain.be/public/Exports%20reddot/adpi/images/PlanparkingsLLN090607-sl.jpg