Machine Learning Coffee Seminar: "Studying mutational processes in cancer"

Ville Mustonen, Professor of Computer Science, University of Helsinki

Studying mutational processes in cancer

Abstract: Somatic mutations in cancer have accumulated during its evolution and are caused by different exposures to carcinogens and therapeutic agents, as well as, intrinsic errors that occur during DNA replication. Analysing a set of cancer samples jointly allows to explain their somatic mutations as a linear combination of (to be learned) mutational signatures. In this presentation I will discuss the problem of learning mutational signatures from cancer data using probabilistic modelling and nonnegative matrix factorisation. I further describe our on going work using mutational signatures in the context of drug response prediction and extensions of the basic model to explicitly include DNA repair processes.

Machine Learning Coffee seminars are weekly seminars held jointly by the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. The seminars aim to gather people from different fields of science with interest in machine learning. Talks will begin at 9:15 am and porridge and coffee will be served from 9:00 am.

Welcome!