Fast, accurate, and racially unbiased pan-cancer tumor-only variant calling with tabular machine learning

Accurately identifying somatic mutations is essential for precision oncology and crucial for calculating tumor-mutational burden (TMB), an important predictor of response to immunotherapy. For tumor-only variant calling (i.e., when the cancer biopsy but not the patient’s normal tissue sample is sequenced), accurately distinguishing somatic mutations from germline variants is a challenging problem that, when unaddressed, results in unreliable, biased, and inflated TMB estimates. Here, we apply machine learning to the task of somatic vs germline classification in tumor-only solid tumor samples using TabNet, XGBoost, and LightGBM, three machine-learning models for tabular data. We constructed a training set for supervised classification using features derived exclusively from tumor-only variant calling and drawing somatic and germline truth labels from an independent pipeline using the patient-matched normal samples. All three trained models achieved state-of-the-art performance on two holdout test datasets: a TCGA dataset including sarcoma, breast adenocarcinoma, and endometrial carcinoma samples (AUC > 94%), and a metastatic melanoma dataset (AUC > 85%). Concordance between matched-normal and tumor-only TMB improves from R(2) = 0.006 to 0.71–0.76 with the addition of a machine-learning classifier, with LightGBM performing best. Notably, these machine-learning models generalize across cancer subtypes and capture kits with a call rate of 100%. We reproduce the recent finding that tumor-only TMB estimates for Black patients are extremely inflated relative to that of white patients due to the racial biases of germline databases. We show that our approach with XGBoost and LightGBM eliminates this significant racial bias in tumor-only variant calling.