Portrait de Yue Li

Yue Li

Membre académique associé
Professeur adjoint, McGill University, École d'informatique
Sujets de recherche
Biologie computationnelle

Biographie

J'ai obtenu un doctorat en informatique et biologie computationnelle de l'Université de Toronto en 2014. Avant de me joindre à l’Université McGill, j'ai été associé postdoctoral au Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2015-2018).

Mes recherches portent sur le développement de modèles d'apprentissage probabilistes interprétables et de modèles d'apprentissage profond pour modéliser les données génétiques et épigénétiques, les dossiers de santé électroniques et les données génomiques unicellulaires.

En intégrant systématiquement des données multimodales et longitudinales, je cherche à obtenir des applications qui auront des effets tangibles en médecine computationnelle, y compris la construction de systèmes de recommandation clinique intelligents, la prévision des trajectoires de santé des patients, les prédictions personnalisées de risques polygéniques, la caractérisation des mutations génétiques fonctionnelles multitraits, et la dissection des éléments réglementaires spécifiques au type de cellule qui sont à la base des traits complexes et des maladies chez l'homme. Mon programme de recherche couvre trois domaines principaux impliquant l'apprentissage automatique appliqué à la génomique computationnelle et à la santé.

Étudiants actuels

Postdoctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Co-superviseur⋅e :
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill
Maîtrise recherche - McGill
Doctorat - McGill

Publications

Bidirectional Generative Pre-training for Improving Healthcare Time-series Representation Learning
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
He Zhu
Learning time-series representations for discriminative tasks, such as classification and regression, has been a long-standing challenge in … (voir plus)the healthcare domain. Current pre-training methods are limited in either unidirectional next-token prediction or randomly masked token prediction. We propose a novel architecture called Bidirectional Timely Generative Pre-trained Transformer (BiTimelyGPT), which pre-trains on biosignals and longitudinal clinical records by both next-token and previous-token prediction in alternating transformer layers. This pre-training task preserves original distribution and data shapes of the time-series. Additionally, the full-rank forward and backward attention matrices exhibit more expressive representation capabilities. Using biosignals and longitudinal clinical records, BiTimelyGPT demonstrates superior performance in predicting neurological functionality, disease diagnosis, and physiological signs. By visualizing the attention heatmap, we observe that the pre-trained BiTimelyGPT can identify discriminative segments from biosignal time-series sequences, even more so after fine-tuning on the task.
Abstract 4142894: Multimorbidity Trajectories Across the Lifespan in Patients with Congenital Heart Disease
Chao Li
Aihua Liu
Solomon Bendayan
Liming Guo
Judith Therrien
Robyn Tamblyn
Jay Brophy
Ariane Marelli
Background: Befitted from advances in medical care, patients with congenital heart disease (CHD) now survive to adulthood but face elevated… (voir plus) risks of both cardiac and non-cardiac complications. Understanding the trajectories of comorbidity development over a patient's lifespan is cornerstone to optimize care expected to improve long-term health outcomes. Research Aim: This study aims to investigate the temporal sequences and evolution of comorbidities in CHD patients across their lifespan. We hypothesize that multimorbidity trajectories in CHD patients are linked to CHD lesion severity and age at onset of specific comorbidities. Methods: Using the Quebec CHD database which comprised data in outpatient visits, hospitalization records and vital status from 1983 to 2017, we designed a longitudinal cohort study evaluating the development of 39 comorbidities coded using ICD-9/10. Temporal sequences were mapped using median age of onset. Associations between disease pairs were quantified by hazard ratios from Cox proportional hazard models adjusting for age, sex, genetic syndrome, competing risks of death, and taking into account the time-varying nature of the predictor diseases. Results: The cohort included 9,764 individuals with severe and 127,729 with non-severe CHD lesions. In severe CHD patients, most comorbidities developed between ages 25 and 40. Comorbidity progression began with childhood cardiovascular diseases, followed by systemic diseases such as diabetes, liver and kidney diseases, and advanced to heart failure and dementia in middle adulthood. In addition, mental disorders emerged in early adulthood and were associated with subsequent development of kidney diseases and dementia. Different trajectories were observed in non-severe CHD patients with 2-3 decades later disease onsets and non-differential onsets between cardiovascular and systemic complications (Figure). Conclusions: Distinct multimorbidity trajectories were observed in CHD patients by CHD lesion severity. In patients with severe CHD lesions, early systemic diseases significantly influenced subsequent complications. These findings highlight the need for well-timed surveillance guidelines and interventions to improve health outcomes.
scMoE: single-cell mixture of experts for learning hierarchical, cell-type-specific, and interpretable representations from heterogeneous scRNA-seq data
Michael Huang
Advancements in single-cell transcriptomics methods have resulted in a wealth of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. Methods to lea… (voir plus)rn cell representation from atlas-level scRNA-seq data across diverse tissues can shed light into cell functions implicated in diseases such as cancer. However, integrating large-scale and heterogeneous scRNA-seq data is challenging due to the disparity of cell-types and batch effects. We present single-cell Mixture of Expert (scMoE), a hierarchical mixture of experts single-cell topic model. Our key contributions are the cell-type specific experts, which explicitly aligns topics with cell-types, and the integration of hierarchical cell-type lineages and domain knowledge. scMoE is both transferable and highly interpretable. We benchmarked our scMoE’s performance on 9 single-cell RNA-seq datasets for clustering and 3 simulated spatial datasets for spatial deconvolution. We additionally show that our model, using single-cell references, yields meaningful biological results by deconvolving 3 cancer bulk RNA-seq datasets and 2 spatial transcriptomics datasets. scMoE is able to identify cell-types of survival importance, find cancer subtype specific deconvolutional patterns, and capture meaningful spatially distinct cell-type distributions.
ConvNTC: Convolutional neural tensor completion for predicting the disease-related miRNA pairs and cell-related drug pairs
Pei Liu
Xiao Liang
Jiawei Luo
Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model
Xinyu Yuan
Zhihao Zhan
Zuobai Zhang
Manqi Zhou
Jianan Zhao
Boyu Han
Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by… (voir plus) self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. To this end, we present **s**ingle **c**ell, **Cell-o**ntology guided TFM (scCello). We introduce cell-type coherence loss and ontology alignment loss, which are minimized along with the masked gene expression prediction loss during the pre-training. The novel loss component guide scCello to learn the cell-type-specific representation and the structural relation between cell types from the cell ontology graph, respectively. We pre-trained scCello on 22 million cells from CellxGene database leveraging their cell-type labels mapped to the cell ontology graph from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry. Our TFM demonstrates competitive generalization and transferability performance over the existing TFMs on biologically important tasks including identifying novel cell types of unseen cells, prediction of cell-type-specific marker genes, and cancer drug responses.
TrajGPT: Healthcare Time-Series Representation Learning for Trajectory Prediction
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
Mike He Zhu
In many domains, such as healthcare, time-series data is irregularly sampled with varying intervals between observations. This creates chall… (voir plus)enges for classical time-series models that require equally spaced data. To address this, we propose a novel time-series Transformer called **Trajectory Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TrajGPT)**. It introduces a data-dependent decay mechanism that adaptively forgets irrelevant information based on clinical context. By interpreting TrajGPT as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), our approach captures continuous dynamics from sparse and irregular time-series data. Experimental results show that TrajGPT, with its time-specific inference approach, accurately predicts trajectories without requiring task-specific fine-tuning.
TrajGPT: Healthcare Time-Series Representation Learning for Trajectory Prediction
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
Mike He Zhu
In many domains, such as healthcare, time-series data is irregularly sampled with varying intervals between observations. This creates chall… (voir plus)enges for classical time-series models that require equally spaced data. To address this, we propose a novel time-series Transformer called **Trajectory Generative Pre-trained Transformer (TrajGPT)**. It introduces a data-dependent decay mechanism that adaptively forgets irrelevant information based on clinical context. By interpreting TrajGPT as ordinary differential equations (ODEs), our approach captures continuous dynamics from sparse and irregular time-series data. Experimental results show that TrajGPT, with its time-specific inference approach, accurately predicts trajectories without requiring task-specific fine-tuning.
TrajGPT: Irregular Time-Series Representation Learning for Health Trajectory Analysis
Ziyang Song
Qincheng Lu
Mike He Zhu
MiRGraph: A hybrid deep learning approach to identify microRNA-target interactions by integrating heterogeneous regulatory network and genomic sequences
Pei Liu
Ying Liu
Jiawei Luo
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) mediates gene expression regulation by targeting specific messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in the cytoplasm. They can function as b… (voir plus)oth tumor suppressors and oncogenes depending on the specific miRNA and its target genes. Detecting miRNA-target interactions (MTIs) is critical for unraveling the complex mechanisms of gene regulation and promising towards RNA therapy for cancer. There is currently a lack of MTIs prediction methods that simultaneously perform feature learning from heterogeneous gene regulatory network (GRN) and genomic sequences. To improve the prediction performance of MTIs, we present a novel transformer-based multiview feature learning method – MiRGraph, which consists of two main modules for learning the sequence-based and GRN-based feature embedding. For the former, we utilize the mature miRNA sequences and the complete 3’UTR sequence of the target mRNAs to encode sequence features using a hybrid transformer and convolutional neural network (CNN) (TransCNN) architecture. For the latter, we utilize a heterogeneous graph transformer (HGT) module to extract the relational and structural information from the GRN consisting of miRNA-miRNA, gene-gene and miRNA-target interactions. The TransCNN and HGT modules can be learned end-to-end to predict experimentally validated MTIs from MiRTarBase. MiRGraph outperforms existing methods in not only recapitulating the true MTIs but also in predicting strength of the MTIs based on the in-vitro measurements of miRNA transfections. In a case study on breast cancer, we identified plausible target genes of an oncomir.
MiRGraph: A transformer-based feature learning approach to identify microRNA-target interactions by integrating heterogeneous graph network and sequence information
Pei Liu
Yong Liu
Jiawei Luo
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play a crucial role in the regulation of gene expression by targeting specific mRNAs. They can function as both tumor sup… (voir plus)pressors and oncogenes depending on the specific miRNA and its target genes. Detecting miRNA-target interactions (MTIs) is critical for unraveling the complex mechanisms of gene regulation and identifying therapeutic targets and diagnostic markers. There is currently a lack of MTIs prediction method that simultaneously performs feature learning on heterogeneous graph network and sequence information. To improve the prediction performance of MTIs, we present a novel transformer-based multi-view feature learning method, named MiRGraph. It consists of two main modules for learning the sequence and heterogeneous graph network, respectively. For learning the sequence-based feaature embedding, we utilize the mature miRNA sequence and the complete 3’UTR sequence of the target mRNAs to encode sequence features. Specifically, a transformer-based CNN (TransCNN) module is designed for miRNAs and genes respectively to extract their personalized sequence features. For learning the network-based feature embedding, we utilize a heterogeneous graph transformer (HGT) module to extract the relational and structural information in a heterogeneous graph consisting of miRNA-miRNA, gene-gene and miRNA-target interactions. We learn the TransCNN and HGT modules end-to-end by utilizing a feedforward network, which takes the combined embedded features of the miRNA-gene pair to predict MTIs. Comparisons with other existing MTIs prediction methods illustrates the superiority of MiRGraph under standard criteria. In a case study on breast cancer, we identified plausible target genes of an oncomir hsa-MiR-122-5p and plausible miRNAs that regulate the oncogene BRCA1.
Cell ontology guided transcriptome foundation model
Xinyu Yuan
Zhihao Zhan
Zuobai Zhang
Manqi Zhou
Jianan Zhao
Boyu Han
Transcriptome foundation models (TFMs) hold great promises of deciphering the transcriptomic language that dictate diverse cell functions by… (voir plus) self-supervised learning on large-scale single-cell gene expression data, and ultimately unraveling the complex mechanisms of human diseases. However, current TFMs treat cells as independent samples and ignore the taxonomic relationships between cell types, which are available in cell ontology graphs. We argue that effectively leveraging this ontology information during the TFM pre-training can improve learning biologically meaningful gene co-expression patterns while preserving TFM as a general purpose foundation model for downstream zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks. To this end, we present **s**ingle **c**ell, **Cell**-**o**ntology guided TFM (scCello). We introduce cell-type coherence loss and ontology alignment loss, which are minimized along with the masked gene expression prediction loss during the pre-training. The novel loss component guide scCello to learn the cell-type-specific representation and the structural relation between cell types from the cell ontology graph, respectively. We pre-trained scCello on 22 million cells from CellxGene database leveraging their cell-type labels mapped to the cell ontology graph from Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry. Our TFM demonstrates competitive generalization and transferability performance over the existing TFMs on biologically important tasks including identifying novel cell types of unseen cells, prediction of cell-type-specific marker genes, and cancer drug responses. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/scCello.
GFETM: Genome Foundation-based Embedded Topic Model for scATAC-seq Modeling
Yimin Fan
Adrien Osakwe
Shi Han
Yu Li