Interpretability reliability guide

Contents

Interpretability reliability guide#

This page provides a decision framework for assessing the reliability of GO importance, TAD importance, and covariate attention scores produced by NetworkVI. It is intended as actionable guidance for end users applying NetworkVI to a new dataset.

Note

All scores produced by NetworkVI are associations, not causal mechanisms. GO/TAD importance reflects how well a biological programme discriminates a cell population in the learned latent space; it does not imply that the programme mechanistically drives the phenotype.

Decision flowchart#

The figure below is the primary reference. It walks through the full workflow (from data examination and task definition to NetworkVI training and interpretability execution) and summarises when results are reliable, when they are expected to fail, and what to do in each case.

NetworkVI interpretability decision flowchart

See also#

Interpretability: Inferring importances for GO and genes — step-by-step tutorial for GO and gene importances
Interpretability: Inferring GO-specific covariate attention values — tutorial for GO-specific covariate attention