Domain adaptation in small-scale and heterogeneous biological datasets

TL;DR

This paper reviews domain adaptation techniques tailored for small, heterogeneous biological datasets, highlighting their potential to improve model generalization across diverse biological studies.

Contribution

It provides a synthetic overview of domain adaptation methods specific to small-scale, complex biological data, emphasizing challenges and future directions.

Findings

Domain adaptation can improve model transferability in biology.

Most methods are designed for large-scale data, not small, heterogeneous datasets.

Customized domain adaptation approaches are needed for biological applications.

Abstract

Machine learning techniques are steadily becoming more important in modern biology, and are used to build predictive models, discover patterns, and investigate biological problems. However, models trained on one dataset are often not generalizable to other datasets from different cohorts or laboratories, due to differences in the statistical properties of these datasets. These could stem from technical differences, such as the measurement technique used, or from relevant biological differences between the populations studied. Domain adaptation, a type of transfer learning, can alleviate this problem by aligning the statistical distributions of features and samples among different datasets so that similar models can be applied across them. However, a majority of state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods are designed to work with large-scale data, mostly text and images, while biological datasets often suffer from small sample sizes, and possess complexities such as heterogeneity of the feature space. This Review aims to synthetically discuss domain adaptation methods in the context of small-scale and highly heterogeneous biological data. We describe the benefits and challenges of domain adaptation in biological research and critically discuss some of its objectives, strengths, and weaknesses through key representative methodologies. We argue for the incorporation of domain adaptation techniques to the computational biologist's toolkit, with further development of customized approaches.