No Arabic abstract
Scientists and engineers employ stochastic numerical simulators to model empirically observed phenomena. In contrast to purely statistical models, simulators express scientific principles that provide powerful inductive biases, improve generalization to new data or scenarios and allow for fewer, more interpretable and domain-relevant parameters. Despite these advantages, tuning a simulators parameters so that its outputs match data is challenging. Simulation-based inference (SBI) seeks to identify parameter sets that a) are compatible with prior knowledge and b) match empirical observations. Importantly, SBI does not seek to recover a single best data-compatible parameter set, but rather to identify all high probability regions of parameter space that explain observed data, and thereby to quantify parameter uncertainty. In Bayesian terminology, SBI aims to retrieve the posterior distribution over the parameters of interest. In contrast to conventional Bayesian inference, SBI is also applicable when one can run model simulations, but no formula or algorithm exists for evaluating the probability of data given parameters, i.e. the likelihood. We present $texttt{sbi}$, a PyTorch-based package that implements SBI algorithms based on neural networks. $texttt{sbi}$ facilitates inference on black-box simulators for practising scientists and engineers by providing a unified interface to state-of-the-art algorithms together with documentation and tutorials.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) constitute a class of deep learning methods for graph data. They have wide applications in chemistry and biology, such as molecular property prediction, reaction prediction and drug-target interaction prediction. Despite the interest, GNN-based modeling is challenging as it requires graph data pre-processing and modeling in addition to programming and deep learning. Here we present DGL-LifeSci, an open-source package for deep learning on graphs in life science. DGL-LifeSci is a python toolkit based on RDKit, PyTorch and Deep Graph Library (DGL). DGL-LifeSci allows GNN-based modeling on custom datasets for molecular property prediction, reaction prediction and molecule generation. With its command-line interfaces, users can perform modeling without any background in programming and deep learning. We test the command-line interfaces using standard benchmarks MoleculeNet, USPTO, and ZINC. Compared with previous implementations, DGL-LifeSci achieves a speed up by up to 6x. For modeling flexibility, DGL-LifeSci provides well-optimized modules for various stages of the modeling pipeline. In addition, DGL-LifeSci provides pre-trained models for reproducing the test experiment results and applying models without training. The code is distributed under an Apache-2.0 License and is freely accessible at https://github.com/awslabs/dgl-lifesci.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of in-silico epidemiological modelling in predicting the dynamics of infectious diseases to inform health policy and decision makers about suitable prevention and containment strategies. Work in this setting involves solving challenging inference and control problems in individual-based models of ever increasing complexity. Here we discuss recent breakthroughs in machine learning, specifically in simulation-based inference, and explore its potential as a novel venue for model calibration to support the design and evaluation of public health interventions. To further stimulate research, we are developing software interfaces that turn two cornerstone COVID-19 and malaria epidemiology models COVID-sim, (https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/) and OpenMalaria (https://github.com/SwissTPH/openmalaria) into probabilistic programs, enabling efficient interpretable Bayesian inference within those simulators.
Data-driven design is making headway into a number of application areas, including protein, small-molecule, and materials engineering. The design goal is to construct an object with desired properties, such as a protein that binds to a therapeutic target, or a superconducting material with a higher critical temperature than previously observed. To that end, costly experimental measurements are being replaced with calls to high-capacity regression models trained on labeled data, which can be leveraged in an in silico search for design candidates. However, the design goal necessitates moving into regions of the design space beyond where such models were trained. Therefore, one can ask: should the regression model be altered as the design algorithm explores the design space, in the absence of new data? Herein, we answer this question in the affirmative. In particular, we (i) formalize the data-driven design problem as a non-zero-sum game, (ii) develop a principled strategy for retraining the regression model as the design algorithm proceeds---what we refer to as autofocusing, and (iii) demonstrate the promise of autofocusing empirically.
Recently, several classifiers that combine primary tumor data, like gene expression data, and secondary data sources, such as protein-protein interaction networks, have been proposed for predicting outcome in breast cancer. In these approaches, new composite features are typically constructed by aggregating the expression levels of several genes. The secondary data sources are employed to guide this aggregation. Although many studies claim that these approaches improve classification performance over single gene classifiers, the gain in performance is difficult to assess. This stems mainly from the fact that different breast cancer data sets and validation procedures are employed to assess the performance. Here we address these issues by employing a large cohort of six breast cancer data sets as benchmark set and by performing an unbiased evaluation of the classification accuracies of the different approaches. Contrary to previous claims, we find that composite feature classifiers do not outperform simple single gene classifiers. We investigate the effect of (1) the number of selected features; (2) the specific gene set from which features are selected; (3) the size of the training set and (4) the heterogeneity of the data set on the performance of composite feature and single gene classifiers. Strikingly, we find that randomization of secondary data sources, which destroys all biological information in these sources, does not result in a deterioration in performance of composite feature classifiers. Finally, we show that when a proper correction for gene set size is performed, the stability of single gene sets is similar to the stability of composite feature sets. Based on these results there is currently no reason to prefer prognostic classifiers based on composite features over single gene classifiers for predicting outcome in breast cancer.
In this paper, we present a new open source toolkit for automatic speech recognition (ASR), named CAT (CRF-based ASR Toolkit). A key feature of CAT is discriminative training in the framework of conditional random field (CRF), particularly with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) inspired state topology. CAT contains a full-fledged implementation of CTC-CRF and provides a complete workflow for CRF-based end-to-end speech recognition. Evaluation results on Chinese and English benchmarks such as Switchboard and Aishell show that CAT obtains the state-of-the-art results among existing end-to-end models with less parameters, and is competitive compared with the hybrid DNN-HMM models. Towards flexibility, we show that i-vector based speaker-adapted recognition and latency control mechanism can be explored easily and effectively in CAT. We hope CAT, especially the CRF-based framework and software, will be of broad interest to the community, and can be further explored and improved.