  While deep learning has achieved great success in computer vision and many
other fields, currently it does not work very well on patient genomic data with
the "big p, small N" problem (i.e., a relatively small number of samples with
high-dimensional features). In order to make deep learning work with a small
amount of training data, we have to design new models that facilitate few-shot
learning. Here we present the Affinity Network Model (AffinityNet), a data
efficient deep learning model that can learn from a limited number of training
examples and generalize well. The backbone of the AffinityNet model consists of
stacked k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) attention pooling layers. The kNN attention
pooling layer is a generalization of the Graph Attention Model (GAM), and can
be applied to not only graphs but also any set of objects regardless of whether
a graph is given or not. As a new deep learning module, kNN attention pooling
layers can be plugged into any neural network model just like convolutional
layers. As a simple special case of kNN attention pooling layer, feature
attention layer can directly select important features that are useful for
classification tasks. Experiments on both synthetic data and cancer genomic
data from TCGA projects show that our AffinityNet model has better
generalization power than conventional neural network models with little
training data. The code is freely available at
https://github.com/BeautyOfWeb/AffinityNet .
