AI in Biology & Microbiome Research: Machine Learning & Predictive Omics

Conducted every alternate Sunday (10:00 AM – 5:00 PM IST · Live Online). Kindly register below and our team will get back to you with the upcoming cohort schedule and onboarding details.

Workshop Overview

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are transforming how biologists discover diagnostic biomarkers, predict host phenotypes from microbiome profiles, and model complex multi-omics systems. This hands-on workshop demystifies AI for life scientists and teaches practical, reproducible machine-learning workflows tailored for microbiome and biological datasets.

1. Preparing Biological & Microbiome Data for Machine Learning

• Addressing high dimensionality (p ≫ n), sparsity, batch effects, and compositionality before training ML models.

• Feature selection, CLR transformation, and preventing data leakage between training and test splits.

2. Supervised ML for Microbiome & Omics Biomarker Discovery

• Training and tuning Random Forests, Gradient Boosted Trees (XGBoost), LASSO / Elastic-Net regularized regression, and Support Vector Machines.

• Stratified k-fold and nested cross-validation, ROC-AUC, Precision–Recall curves, and external cohort validation.

• Explainable AI in biology: interpreting microbial and molecular predictors using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) and permutation importance.

3. Deep Learning, Foundation Models & AI Research Workflows

• Overview of genomic, protein, and single-cell foundation models (AlphaFold, ESM, Nucleotide Transformer).

• Integrating AI coding and literature assistants safely into your daily bioinformatics and manuscript workflow.