Portrait of Yue Li

Yue Li

Associate Academic Member
Assistant Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Research Topics
AI in Health
Bayesian Models
Computational Biology
Deep Learning
Genetics
Large Language Models (LLM)
Multimodal Learning
Single-Cell Genomics

Biography

I completed my PhD degree in computer science and computational biology at the University of Toronto in 2014. Prior to joining McGill University, I was a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT (2015–2018).

In general, my research program covers three main research areas that involve applied machine learning in computational genomics and health. More specifically, it focuses on developing interpretable probabilistic learning models and deep learning models to model genetic, epigenetic, electronic health record and single-cell genomic data.

By systematically integrating multimodal and longitudinal data, I aim to have impactful applications in computational medicine, including building intelligent clinical recommender systems, forecasting patient health trajectories, making personalized polygenic risk predictions, characterizing multi-trait functional genetic mutations, and dissecting cell-type-specific regulatory elements that underpin complex traits and diseases in humans.

Current Students

Postdoctorate - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
PhD - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Principal supervisor :
PhD - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Co-supervisor :
Master's Research - McGill University
Master's Research - McGill University
Postdoctorate - McGill University
Co-supervisor :

Publications

MixEHR-SurG: a joint proportional hazard and guided topic model for inferring mortality-associated topics from electronic health records
Ariane Marelli
Archer Y. Yang
Survival models can help medical practitioners to evaluate the prognostic importance of clinical variables to patient outcomes such as morta… (see more)lity or hospital readmission and subsequently design personalized treatment regimes. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold the promise for large-scale survival analysis based on systematically recorded clinical features for each patient. However, existing survival models either do not scale to high dimensional and multi-modal EHR data or are difficult to interpret. In this study, we present a supervised topic model called MixEHR-SurG to simultaneously integrate heterogeneous EHR data and model survival hazard. Our contributions are three-folds: (1) integrating EHR topic inference with Cox proportional hazards likelihood; (2) integrating patient-specific topic hyperparameters using the PheCode concepts such that each topic can be identified with exactly one PheCode-associated phenotype; (3) multi-modal survival topic inference. This leads to a highly interpretable survival topic model that can infer PheCode-specific phenotype topics associated with patient mortality. We evaluated MixEHR-SurG using a simulated dataset and two real-world EHR datasets: the Quebec Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) data consisting of 8,211 subjects with 75,187 outpatient claim records of 1,767 unique ICD codes; the MIMIC-III consisting of 1,458 subjects with multi-modal EHR records. Compared to the baselines, MixEHR-SurG achieved a superior dynamic AUROC for mortality prediction, with a mean AUROC score of 0.89 in the simulation dataset and a mean AUROC of 0.645 on the CHD dataset. Qualitatively, MixEHR-SurG associates severe cardiac conditions with high mortality risk among the CHD patients after the first heart failure hospitalization and critical brain injuries with increased mortality among the MIMIC-III patients after their ICU discharge.
Multi-ancestry polygenic risk scores using phylogenetic regularization
Accurately predicting phenotype using genotype across diverse ancestry groups remains a significant challenge in human genetics. Many state-… (see more)of-the-art polygenic risk score models are known to have difficulty generalizing to genetic ancestries that are not well represented in their training set. To address this issue, we present a novel machine learning method for fitting genetic effect sizes across multiple ancestry groups simultaneously, while leveraging prior knowledge of the evolutionary relationships among them. We introduce DendroPRS, a machine learning model where SNP effect sizes are allowed to evolve along the branches of the phylogenetic tree capturing the relationship among populations. DendroPRS outperforms existing approaches at two important genotype-to-phenotype prediction tasks: expression QTL analysis and polygenic risk scores. We also demonstrate that our method can be useful for multi-ancestry modelling, both by fitting population-specific effect sizes and by more accurately accounting for covariate effects across groups. We additionally find a subset of genes where there is strong evidence that an ancestry-specific approach improves eQTL modelling.
Machine Learning Informed Diagnosis for Congenital Heart Disease in Large Claims Data Source
Ariane J. Marelli
Chao Li
Aihua Liu
Hanh Nguyen
Harry Moroz
James M. Brophy
Liming Guo
David L. Buckeridge
Archer Y. Yang
Single-cell multi-omics topic embedding reveals cell-type-specific and COVID-19 severity-related immune signatures
Manqi Zhou
Hao Zhang
Zilong Bai
Fei Wang
Biomedical discovery through the integrative biomedical knowledge hub (iBKH)
Chang Su
Yu Hou
Manqi Zhou
Suraj Rajendran
Jacqueline R.M. A. Maasch
Zehra Abedi
Haotan Zhang
Zilong Bai
Anthony Cuturrufo
Winston Guo
Fayzan F. Chaudhry
Gregory Ghahramani
Feixiong Cheng
Rui Zhang
Steven T. DeKosky
Jiang Bian
Fei Wang
Summary The massive and continuously increasing volume of biomedical knowledge derived from biological experiments or gained from healthcare… (see more) practices has become an invaluable treasure for biomedicine. The emerging biomedical knowledge graphs (BKGs) provide an efficient and effective way to manage the abundant knowledge in biomedical and life science. In the present study, we harmonized and integrated data from diverse biomedical resources to curate a comprehensive BKG, named the integrative Biomedical Knowledge Hub (iBKH). To facilitate the usage of iBKH in biomedical research, we developed a web-based, easy-to-use, publicly available graphical portal that allows fast, interactive, and visualized knowledge retrieval in iBKH. Furthermore, an efficient and scalable graph learning pipeline was developed for novel knowledge discovery in iBKH. As a proof of concept, we performed our iBKH-based method for computational in silico drug repurposing for Alzheimer’s disease. The iBKH is publicly available at: http://ibkh.ai/ .
Single-cell multi-omic topic embedding reveals cell-type-specific and COVID-19 severity-related immune signatures
Manqi Zhou
Hao Zhang
Zilong Bai
Fei Wang
The advent of single-cell multi-omics sequencing technology makes it possible for re-searchers to leverage multiple modalities for individua… (see more)l cells and explore cell heterogeneity. However, the high dimensional, discrete, and sparse nature of the data make the downstream analysis particularly challenging. Most of the existing computational methods for single-cell data analysis are either limited to single modality or lack flexibility and interpretability. In this study, we propose an interpretable deep learning method called multi-omic embedded topic model (moETM) to effectively perform integrative analysis of high-dimensional single-cell multimodal data. moETM integrates multiple omics data via a product-of-experts in the encoder for efficient variational inference and then employs multiple linear decoders to learn the multi-omic signatures of the gene regulatory programs. Through comprehensive experiments on public single-cell transcriptome and chromatin accessibility data (i.e., scRNA+scATAC), as well as scRNA and proteomic data (i.e., CITE-seq), moETM demonstrates superior performance compared with six state-of-the-art single-cell data analysis methods on seven publicly available datasets. By applying moETM to the scRNA+scATAC data in human bone marrow mononuclear cells (BMMCs), we identified sequence motifs corresponding to the transcription factors that regulate immune gene signatures. Applying moETM analysis to CITE-seq data from the COVID-19 patients revealed not only known immune cell-type-specific signatures but also composite multi-omic biomarkers of critical conditions due to COVID-19, thus providing insights from both biological and clinical perspectives.
Modeling electronic health record data using an end-to-end knowledge-graph-informed topic model
Yuesong Zou
Ziyang Song
David L. Buckeridge
The rapid growth of electronic health record (EHR) datasets opens up promising opportunities to understand human diseases in a systematic wa… (see more)y. However, effective extraction of clinical knowledge from the EHR data has been hindered by its sparsity and noisy information. We present GAT-ETM, an end-to-end knowledge graph-based multimodal embedded topic model. GAT-ETM distills latent disease topics from EHR data by learning the embedding from a constructed medical knowledge graph. We applied GAT-ETM to a large-scale EHR dataset consisting of over 1 million patients. We evaluated its performance based on EHR reconstruction and drug imputation. GAT-ETM demonstrated superior performance over the alternative methods on both tasks. Moreover, our model learned clinically meaningful graph-informed embedding of the EHR codes. In additional, our model is also able to discover interpretable and accurate patient representations for patient stratification and drug recommendations. Our code is available at Anonymous GitHub.
Automatic Phenotyping by a Seed-guided Topic Model.
Ziyang Song
Yuanyi Hu
David L. Buckeridge
Electronic health records (EHRs) provide rich clinical information and the opportunities to extract epidemiological patterns to understand a… (see more)nd predict patient disease risks with suitable machine learning methods such as topic models. However, existing topic models do not generate identifiable topics each predicting a unique phenotype. One promising direction is to use known phenotype concepts to guide topic inference. We present a seed-guided Bayesian topic model called MixEHR-Seed with 3 contributions: (1) for each phenotype, we infer a dual-form of topic distribution: a seed-topic distribution over a small set of key EHR codes and a regular topic distribution over the entire EHR vocabulary; (2) we model age-dependent disease progression as Markovian dynamic topic priors; (3) we infer seed-guided multi-modal topics over distinct EHR data types. For inference, we developed a variational inference algorithm. Using MixEHR-Seed, we inferred 1569 PheCode-guided phenotype topics from an EHR database in Quebec, Canada covering 1.3 million patients for up to 20-year follow-up with 122 million records for 8539 and 1126 unique diagnostic and drug codes, respectively. We observed (1) accurate phenotype prediction by the guided topics, (2) clinically relevant PheCode-guided disease topics, (3) meaningful age-dependent disease prevalence. Source code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/MixEHR-Seed.
EpiTopics: A dynamic machine learning model to predict and inform non-pharmacological public health interventions from global news reports
Zhi Wen
Jingfu Zhang
Guido Powell
Imane Chafi
David L. Buckeridge
Inferring global-scale temporal latent topics from news reports to predict public health interventions for COVID-19
Zhi Wen
Guido Powell
Imane Chafi
David L. Buckeridge
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of non-pharmacological interventions (NPI) for controlling epidemics of emerging infect… (see more)ious diseases. Despite their importance, NPI have been monitored mainly through the manual efforts of volunteers. This approach hinders measurement of the NPI effectiveness and development of evidence to guide their use to control the global pandemic. We present EpiTopics, a machine learning approach to support automation of the NPI prediction and monitoring at both the document-level and country-level by mining the vast amount of unlabelled news reports on COVID-19. EpiTopics uses a 3-stage, transfer-learning algorithm to classify documents according to NPI categories, relying on topic modelling to support result interpretation. We identified 25 interpretable topics under 4 distinct and coherent COVID-related themes. Importantly, the use of these topics resulted in significant improvements over alternative automated methods in predicting the NPIs in labelled documents and in predicting country-level NPIs for 42 countries.
Supervised multi-specialist topic model with applications on large-scale electronic health record data
Ziyang Song
Xavier Sumba Toral
Yixin Xu
Aihua Liu
Liming Guo
Guido Powell
Ariane Marelli
Motivation: Electronic health record (EHR) data provides a new venue to elucidate disease comorbidities and latent phenotypes for precision … (see more)medicine. To fully exploit its potential, a realistic data generative process of the EHR data needs to be modelled. We present MixEHR-S to jointly infer specialist-disease topics from the EHR data. As the key contribution, we model the specialist assignments and ICD-coded diagnoses as the latent topics based on patient's underlying disease topic mixture in a novel unified supervised hierarchical Bayesian topic model. For efficient inference, we developed a closed-form collapsed variational inference algorithm to learn the model distributions of MixEHR-S. We applied MixEHR-S to two independent large-scale EHR databases in Quebec with three targeted applications: (1) Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) diagnostic prediction among 154,775 patients; (2) Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) diagnostic prediction among 73,791 patients; (3) future insulin treatment prediction among 78,712 patients diagnosed with diabetes as a mean to assess the disease exacerbation. In all three applications, MixEHR-S conferred clinically meaningful latent topics among the most predictive latent topics and achieved superior target prediction accuracy compared to the existing methods, providing opportunities for prioritizing high-risk patients for healthcare services. MixEHR-S source code and scripts of the experiments are freely available at https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/mixehrS
Publisher Correction: The default network of the human brain is associated with perceived social isolation
R. Nathan Spreng
Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo
Alain Dagher
Philipp Koellinger
Gideon Nave
Anthony Ong
Julius M. Kernbach
Thomas V. Wiecki
Tian Ge
Avram J. Holmes
B. T. Thomas Yeo
Gary R. Turner
Robin I. M. Dunbar