Some expeditions in predictive modeling to enable systems biology

GRAND Seminar Friday, March 28, 12noon, Room 4801

Gaurav Pandey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences
Mount Sinai School of Medicine (New York)

Host:

Huzefa Rangwala

Abstract:

With the data explosion being witnessed in biology, immense emphasis is being placed on developing systematic approaches to integrate the various types and sources of data to build models of complex biological processes and diseases. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to model complex biomedical phenotypes using predictive modeling approaches applied to large genome-wide data sets. The first part presents experiences and results from a collaborative-competitive effort to model and predict survival rates for breast cancer patients using a recently published set of gene expression, copy number aberration and clinical features. In the second part, I will present our analysis of heterogeneous ensemble predictive methods that generally produce the best performance for complex biomedical prediction problems. These methods leverage the consensus and diversity among hundreds or even thousands of heterogeneous base predictors, and thus generally outperform even the best homogeneous ensemble methods, like boosting and random forests.

Short Bio:

Gaurav Pandey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (New York) and is part of the newly formed Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2010, and subsequently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary fields of interest are computational biology, genomics and large-scale data analysis and mining, and he has published extensively in these areas.