Papers › Contextual Regression: An Accurate and Conveniently Interpretable Nonlinear Model for...

Contextual Regression: An Accurate and Conveniently Interpretable Nonlinear Model for Mining Discovery from Scientific Data

30 Oct 2017arXiv:1710.10728archive 2025-07-28

Chengyu Liu, Wei Wang

Machine learning algorithms such as linear regression, SVM and neural network have played an increasingly important role in the process of scientific discovery. However, none of them is both interpretable and accurate on nonlinear datasets. Here we present contextual regression, a method that joins these two desirable properties together using a hybrid architecture of neural network embedding and dot product layer. We demonstrate its high prediction accuracy and sensitivity through the task of predictive feature selection on a simulated dataset and the application of predicting open chromatin sites in the human genome. On the simulated data, our method achieved high fidelity recovery of feature contributions under random noise levels up to 200%. On the open chromatin dataset, the application of our method not only outperformed the state of the art method in terms of accuracy, but also unveiled two previously unfound open chromatin related histone marks. Our method can fill the blank of accurate and interpretable nonlinear modeling in scientific data mining tasks.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Network Embeddingfeature selectionregressionscientific discovery

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SVM

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections