A Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing Approach for Classifying Massive DNA Methylation Data of Cancer

Abstract

The recent advancements in cancer genomics have put under the spotlight DNA methylation, a genetic modification that regulates the functioning of the genome and whose modifications have an important role in tumorigenesis and tumor-suppression. Because of the high dimensionality and the enormous amount of genomic data that are produced through the last advancements in Next Generation Sequencing, it is very challenging to effectively make use of DNA methylation data in diagnostics applications, e.g., in the identification of healthy vs diseased samples. Additionally, state-of-the-art techniques are not fast enough to rapidly produce reliable results or efficient in managing those massive amounts of data. For this reason, we propose HD-classifier, an in-memory cognitive-based hyperdimensional (HD) supervised machine learning algorithm for the classification of tumor vs non tumor samples through the analysis of their DNA Methylation data. The approach takes inspiration from how the human brain is able to remember and distinguish simple and complex concepts by adopting hypervectors and no single numerical values. Exactly as the brain works, this allows for encoding complex patterns, which makes the whole architecture robust to failures and mistakes also with noisy data. We design and develop an algorithm and a software tool that is able to perform supervised classification with the HD approach. We conduct experiments on three DNA methylation datasets of different types of cancer in order to prove the validity of our algorithm, i.e., Breast Invasive Carcinoma (BRCA), Kidney renal papillary cell carcinoma (KIRP), and Thyroid carcinoma (THCA). We obtain outstanding results in terms of accuracy and computational time with a low amount of computational resources. Furthermore, we validate our approach by comparing it (i) to BIGBIOCL, a software based on Random Forest for classifying big omics datasets in distributed computing environments, (ii) to Support Vector Machine (SVM), and (iii) to Decision Tree state-of-the-art classification methods. Finally, we freely release both the datasets and the software on GitHub.