New paper in Scientific Data: “HeliantHOME, a public and centralized database of phenotypic sunflower data”. We have created HeliantHOME (http://www.helianthome.org), a curated, public, and interactive database of phenotypes including developmental, structural and environmental ones, obtained from a large collection of both wild and cultivated sunflower individuals.
New paper: “A comparison of classical and machine learning-based phenotype prediction methods on simulated data and three plant species”. In this work, our aim is to systematically compare 12 different phenotype prediction models, including basic genomic selection methods to more advanced deep learning-based techniques. More importantly, we assess the performance of these models on simulated phenotype data as well as on real-world data from Arabidopsis thaliana and two breeding datasets from soy and corn. The synthetic phenotypic data allow us to analyze all prediction models and especially the selected markers under controlled and predefined settings. We show that Bayes B and linear regression models with sparsity constraints perform best under different simulation settings with respect to explained variance. Further, we can confirm results from other studies that there is no superiority of more complex neural network-based architectures for phenotype prediction compared to well-established methods. However, on real-world data, for which several prediction models yield comparable results with slight advantages for Elastic Net, this picture is less clear, suggesting that there is a lot of room for future research.