Journal ArticleVariant Effect Prediction in the Age of Machine LearningBromberg, Yana; Prabakaran, R; Kabir, Anowarul; Shehu, AmardaOver the years, many computational methods have been created for the analysis of the impact of single amino acid substitutions resulting from single-nucleotide variants in genome coding regions. Historically, all methods have been supervised and thus limited by the inadequate sizes of experimentally curated data sets and by the lack of a standardized definition of variant effect. The emergence of unsupervised, deep learning (DL)-based methods raised an important question: Canmachines learn the language of life fromthe unannotated protein sequence data well enough to identify significant errors in the protein “sentences”? Our analysis suggests that some unsupervised methods perform as well or better than existing supervised methods. Unsupervised methods are also faster and can, thus, be useful in large-scale variant evaluations. For all other methods, however, their performance varies by both evaluation metrics and by the type of variant effect being predicted.We also note that the evaluation of method performance is still lacking on less-studied, nonhuman proteins where unsupervised methods hold the most promise.Cold Spring Harbor: Perspectives in Biology2024-07-0110523474Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology167a0414671943-0264https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a0414672318829; 2310114; 2310113National Science Foundation