Recommendations for machine learning validation in biology

Modern biology frequently relies on machine learning to provide predictions and improve decision processes. There have been recent calls for more scrutiny on machine learning performance and possible limitations. Here we present a set of community-wide recommendations aiming to help establish standards of machine learning validation in biology. Adopting a structured methods description for machine learning based on DOME (data, optimization, model, evaluation) will allow both reviewers and readers to better understand and assess the performance and limitations of a method or outcome. The recommendations are complemented by a machine learning summary table which can be easily included in the supplementary material of published papers.