Machine Learning and Genetics

In this event, you will learn about DNA, in particular, Mitochondrial DNA, otherwise known as mtDNA, which is inherited directly from a mother to its offspring.

We will then discuss Machine Learning techniques that will allow you to cluster mtDNA, and even predict the ethnicity of individuals based upon their mtDNA alone.

We will then reconstruct literally all of human history using other Machine Learning techniques, going all the way back to the first humans in Africa, taking a pit stop in classical civilizations like Ancient Egypt and Phoenicia, culminating in an analysis of modern mtDNA, that connects us to our deepest past.

All genomes in the dataset are courtesy of the National Institutes of Health. Code is courtesy of BlackTree AutoML.

Slides (including the dataset and code) are here.

See you soon!

Charles