The field of computational biology has seen dramatic growth over the past few years. A wide range of high-throughput technologies developed in the last decade now enable us to measure parts of a biological system at various resolutions – at the genome, epigenome, transcriptome, and proteome levels. These technologies are now being used to collect data for an ever-increasingly diverse set of problems, ranging from classical problems such as predicting differentially regulated genes between time points and predicting subcellular localization of RNA and proteins, to models that explore complex mechanistic hypotheses bridging the gap between genetics and disease, population genetics and transcriptional regulation. Fully realizing the scientific and clinical potential of these data requires developing novel supervised and unsupervised learning methods that are scalable, can accommodate heterogeneity, are robust to systematic noise and confounding factors, and provide mechanistic insights.

The goals of this workshop are to

1. present emerging problems and innovative machine learning techniques in computational biology, and
2. generate discussion on how to best model the intricacies of biological data and synthesize and interpret results in light of the current work in the field.

We will invite several rising leaders from the biology/bioinformatics community who will present current research problems in computational biology and lead these discussions based on their own research and experiences. We will also have the usual rigorous screening of contributed talks on novel learning approaches in computational biology. We encourage contributions describing either progress on new bioinformatics problems or work on established problems using methods that are substantially different from established alternatives. Kernel methods, graphical models, feature selection, non-parametric models and other techniques applied to relevant bioinformatics problems would all be appropriate for the workshop. We are particularly keen on considering contributions related to the prediction of functions from genotypes and that target data generated from novel technologies such as gene editing and single cell genomics, though we will consider all submissions that highlight applications of machine learning into computational biology. The targeted audience are people with interest in learning and applications to relevant problems from the life sciences, including NIPS participants without any existing research link to computational biology.