machine learning in 2024

Machine learning in bioinformatics is the application of machine learning algorithms to bioinformatics, including genomics, proteomics, microarrays, systems biology, evolution, and text mining. Prior to the emergence of machine learning, bioinformatics algorithms had to be programmed by hand; for problems such as protein structure prediction, this proved difficult. Machine learning techniques such as deep learning can learn features of data sets rather than requiring the programmer to define them individually. The algorithm can further learn how to combine low-level features into more abstract features, and so on. This multi-layered approach allows such systems to make sophisticated predictions when appropriately trained. These methods contrast with other computational biology approaches which, while exploiting existing datasets, do not allow the data to be interpreted and analyzed in unanticipated ways.