Bringing BERT to the field: Transformer models for gene expression prediction in maize

Authors: Benjamin Levy, Shuying Ni, Zihao Xu, Liyang Zhao
Predicting gene expression levels from upstream promoter regions using deep learning. Collaboration between IACS and Inari.

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Directory Setup

scripts/: directory for production code

• 0-data-loading-processing/:
  • 01-gene-expression.py: downloads and processes gene expression data and saves into "B73_genex.txt".
  • 02-download-process-db-data.py: downloads and processes gene sequences from a specified database: 'Ensembl', 'Maize', 'Maize_addition', 'Refseq'
  • 03-combine-databases.py: combines all the downloaded sequences within all the databases
  • 04a-merge-genex-maize_seq.py:
  • 04b-merge-genex-b73.py:
  • 05a-cluster-maize_seq.sh: clusters the promoter sequences into groups with up to 80% sequence identity, which may be interpreted as paralogs
  • 05b-train-test-split.py: divides the promoter sequences into train and test sets, avoiding a set of pairs that indicate close relations ("paralogs")
  • 06_transformer_preparation.py:
  • 07_train_tokenizer.py: training byte-level BPE for RoBERTa model
• 1-modeling/
  • pretrain.py: training the FLORABERT base using a masked language modeling task. Type python scripts/1-modeling/pretrain.py --help to see command line options, including choice of dataset and whether to warmstart from a partially trained model. Note: not all options will be used by this script.
  • finetune.py: training the FLORABERT regression model (including newly initialized regression head) on multitask regression for gene expression in all 10 tissues. Type python scripts/1-modeling/finetune.py --help to see command line options; mainly for specifying data inputs and output directory for saving model weights.
  • evaluate.py: computing metrics for the trained FLORABERT model
• [2-feature-visualization/](https://github.com/benlevyx/florabert/tree/master/scripts/2-feature-visualization)
  • embedding_vis.py: computing a sample of BERT embeddings for the testing data and saving to a tensorboard log. Can specify how many embeddings to sample with --num-embeddings XX where XX is the number of embeddings (must be integer).

module/: directory for our customized modules

• module/: our main module named florabert that packages customized functions
  • config.py: project-wide configuration settings and absolute paths to important directories/files
  • dataio.py: utilities for performing I/O operations (reading and writing to/from files)
  • gene_db_io.py: helper functions to download and process gene sequences
  • metrics.py: functions for evaluating models
  • nlp.py: custom classes and functions for working with text/sequences
  • training.py: helper functions that make it easier to train models in PyTorch and with Huggingface's Trainer API, as well as custom optimizers and schedulers
  • transformers.py: implementation of RoBERTa model with mean-pooling of final token embeddings, as well as functions for loading and working with Huggingface's transformers library
  • utils.py: General-purpose functions and code
  • visualization.py: helper functions to perform random k-mer flip during data processing and make model prediction

Pretrained models

If you wish to experiment with our pre-trained FLORABERT models, you can find the saved PyTorch models and the Huggingface tokenizer files here

Contents:

• byte-level-bpe-tokenizer: Files expected by a Huggingface transformers.PretrainedTokenizer
  • merges.txt
  • vocab.txt
• transformer: Both language models can instantiate any RoBERTa model from Huggingface's transformers library. The prediction model should instantiate our custom RobertaForSequenceClassificationMeanPool model class
  1. language-model: Trained on all plant promoter sequences
  2. language-model-finetuned: Further trained on just maize promoter sequences
  3. prediction-model: Fine-tuned on the multitask regression problem