Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
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Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#2The technology may not be quite there yet, but there's little doubt in my mind that we'll get there within the next decade or two.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#3I'd really like to hear from the resident hacker news skeptic/crumudgen on this. Really shouldn't be possible at this level of technology.
For example We have no idea what genes control the length of someone's nose or forehead.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#4Could you just throw loads of genomes (about 1.5gb of data) and a photo of peoples faces and train a deep learning model? It would probably do okay, unless of course environmental factors are more important than genetics here. Judging by how different siblings tend to look I’d say genetics isn’t the whole story.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#5Interesting conflict between these researchers.
From Erlich [0]:
"The take home message should be that identifying someone in a group of ten people requires very little effort. Anyone with access to even low dimensional data, such as basic demographic, can do that. This is not very surprising."
"To summarize this point, the title says: “Identification of individuals by trait prediction using whole- genome sequencing data” but most of the trait predictions is carried by ethnicity of the individual (genomic PCs) rather than the trait specific SNPs."
Summarizing: DNA can estimate ethnicity, which can be used to predict a range of traits, including facial structure. These results would be far more impressive if they were able to predict faces in data composed of a single ethnicity. HLI may have overstated their results, but nevertheless they raise important points about re-id.
[0] http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/07/185330.1
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#6Could you just throw loads of genomes (about 1.5gb of data) and a photo of peoples faces and train a deep learning model? It would probably do okay, unless of course environmental factors are more important than genetics here. Judging by how different siblings tend to look I’d say genetics isn’t the whole story.
Identical twins look pretty similar. Siblings only share half their genome with one another.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#7The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element. If you could fully execute the program encoded by a person's DNA, I'd expect to see a reproduction of their face.
However, that depends on correctly mapping the program to its output. I'm skeptical that we're at the point where we can model this correctly. I think this is why you see that all of the predicted faces in the Venter paper look like a generic/averaged face.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#8The fact that identical twins look similar suggests that most of the variation in facial identity is going to be driven by a heritable element. If you could fully execute the program encoded by a person's DNA, I'd expect to see a reproduction of their face. However, that depends on correctly mapping the program to its output. I'm skeptical that we're at the point where we can model this correctly. I think this is why…
Yeah, but they also grew in same uterine environment.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#9Could you just throw loads of genomes (about 1.5gb of data) and a photo of peoples faces and train a deep learning model? It would probably do okay, unless of course environmental factors are more important than genetics here. Judging by how different siblings tend to look I’d say genetics isn’t the whole story.
In theory, yes. In reality, we don't have enough data for that to work. A model that takes the whole genome as input is excessively expressive and would overfit, finding spurious correlations everywhere. In the near term, we still need to preprocess the genome to extract lower-dimensional features of interest.
Re: Geneticists pan paper that claims to predict a person's face from their DNA
#10I'd really like to hear from the resident hacker news skeptic/crumudgen on this. Really shouldn't be possible at this level of technology. For example We have no idea what genes control the length of someone's nose or forehead.
On mobile, so I may not get to reply fully!
We actually do have some idea about necks and I believe noses - the important elements are DNA enhancers. There was a presentation at the Society for Developmental Biology in 2012 on this topic, though I can't recall the scientist who discussed this...