This repo contains the code to reproduce the results of the manuscript "The Effects of Nonlinear Signal on Expression-Based Prediction Performance". In short, we compare linear and nonlinear models in multiple prediction tasks, and find that their predictive ability is roughly equivalent. Further, this similarity is despite the fact that predictive nonlinear signal exists in the data for each of the tasks.

The Python dependencies for this project are managed via Conda. To install them and activate the environment, use the following commands in bash:

conda env create --file environment.yml
conda activate linear_models

The R dependencies for this project are managed via Renv. To set up Renv for the repository, use the commands below within R while working in the linear_signals repo:

install.packages('renv')
renv::init()
renv::restore()

Before running scripts involving sex prediction, you need to download the Flynn et al. labels from this link and put the results in the saged/data directory. Because of the settings on the figshare repo it isn't possible to incorporate that part of the data download into the Snakefile, otherwise I would.

If you want to log training results, you will need to sign up for a free neptune account here.

1. The neptune module is already installed as part of the saged conda environment, but you'll need to grab an API token from the website.
2. Create a neptune project for storing your logs.
3. Store the token in secrets.yml in the format neptune_api_token: "<your_token>", and update the neptune_config file to use your info.

The pipeline to download all the data, and produce all the results shown in the manuscript is managed by Snakemake. To reproduce all results files and figures, run

snakemake -j <NUM_CORES>

Successfully running the full pipeline takes a few months on a single machine. For reference specs, my machine has an 64 GB of RAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 3800xt processor and an NVIDIA 3090 GPU). You can get by with less ram, vRAM, and processor cores, by reducing the degree of paralellism. I imagine the analyses can comfortably fit on a machine with 32GB of ram and a ~1080ti GPU, but I haven't tested the pipeline in such an environment.

If you want to speed up the process and see similar results, you can run the pipeline without hyperparameter optimization with

snakemake -s no_hyperopt_snakefile -j <NUM_CORES>

If you are going to be running the pipeline in a cluster environment, it may be helpful to read through the file slurm_snakefile. This blog post might also be helpful.

When running the full pipeline via snakemake, the data required will be automatically downloaded (excluding the sex prediction labels mentioned in the section below). If you'd like to skip the data download (and in doing so save yourself about a week of downloading and processing things), you can rehydrate this Zenodo archive into the data/ dir.

Likewise, if you'd like to download the results files, they can be found here. If you only need the saved models, they can be found here.