Halimat Chisom Atanda

If you have trouble speaking up about your feelings, I can relate. It can be a little intimidating, and even painful, especially when it’s a close relationship. And even though we introverts love spending time alone, no matter how much we like our own company, sharing a bond with someone is important, too. It’s taken me several failed (and almost-failed) relationships to navigate this part of me.

Computational cancer researchers who use machine learning techniques face a fundamental problem. Massive amounts of data exist for training machine learning models, but this training requires extensive processing due to inconsistencies in format, naming, structure, and other properties of the data files. This means that when scientists use different cancer types and data-cleaning steps, the resulting models behave differently.

When scientists study complex human diseases like cancer, one of the many steps is to compare the DNA sequences from diseased individuals to a template of genetic information from healthy individuals, called the reference genome. This step identifies changes in their DNA, or variants, which researchers then label as best as possible to determine, for example, what caused their disease and how it might respond to treatments.