IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Feature Representation and Learning Methods With Applications in Large-Scale Biological Sequence Analysis

Machine learning has been widely applied in the fields of biomedicine, computational biology, bioinformatics, image processing, and so on. The performance of machine learning methods mainly relies on feature representation that is the mapping from various types of raw data (i.e., image and genomic data) to a discriminant high-dimensional data space, bridging the raw data with the input of learning/inference algorithms. A good representation is often one that captures the discriminative information from the data and supports effective machine learning. However, over the last few decades, most representation learning approaches are labor-intensive and heavily dependent on the professional knowledge of researchers (dependent on handcrafted feature engineering). To conduct more novel applications in bioinformatics and biomedicine, the weakness of current learning algorithms should be overcome by developing novel feature representation learning algorithms, including supervised representation learning algorithms that are learning features from labeled data, unsupervised feature representation strategies that are learning feature representatives from unlabeled data, and deep feature representation learning algorithms that are learning representative features from data using deep learning architectures.