Jackie Rao

Jackie Rao, Ferran Gonzalez Hernandez, Leon Gerard et al.

Antibody lead optimization is inherently a multi-objective challenge in drug discovery. Achieving a balance between different drug-like properties is crucial for the development of viable candidates, and this search becomes exponentially challenging as desired properties grow. The ever-growing zoo of sophisticated in silico tools for predicting antibody properties calls for an efficient joint optimization procedure to overcome resource-intensive sequential filtering pipelines. We present BOAT, a versatile Bayesian optimization framework for multi-property antibody engineering. Our `plug-and-play' framework couples uncertainty-aware surrogate modeling with a genetic algorithm to jointly optimize various predicted antibody traits while enabling efficient exploration of sequence space. Through systematic benchmarking against genetic algorithms and newer generative learning approaches, we demonstrate competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods for multi-objective protein optimization. We identify clear regimes where surrogate-driven optimization outperforms expensive generative approaches and establish practical limits imposed by sequence dimensionality and oracle costs.

Jackie Rao, Paul D. W. Kirk

Effective clustering of biomedical data is crucial in precision medicine, enabling accurate stratifiction of patients or samples. However, the growth in availability of high-dimensional categorical data, including `omics data, necessitates computationally efficient clustering algorithms. We present VICatMix, a variational Bayesian finite mixture model designed for the clustering of categorical data. The use of variational inference (VI) in its training allows the model to outperform competitors in term of efficiency, while maintaining high accuracy. VICatMix furthermore performs variable selection, enhancing its performance on high-dimensional, noisy data. The proposed model incorporates summarisation and model averaging to mitigate poor local optima in VI, allowing for improved estimation of the true number of clusters simultaneously with feature saliency. We demonstrate the performance of VICatMix with both simulated and real-world data, including applications to datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), showing its use in cancer subtyping and driver gene discovery. We demonstrate VICatMix's utility in integrative cluster analysis with different `omics datasets, enabling the discovery of novel subtypes. \textbf{Availability:} VICatMix is freely available as an R package, incorporating C++ for faster computation, at https://github.com/j-ackierao/VICatMix.

Jackie Rao, Francesca L. Crowe, Tom Marshall et al.

We present a federated learning approach for Bayesian model-based clustering of large-scale binary and categorical datasets. We introduce a principled 'divide and conquer' inference procedure using variational inference with local merge and delete moves within batches of the data in parallel, followed by 'global' merge moves across batches to find global clustering structures. We show that these merge moves require only summaries of the data in each batch, enabling federated learning across local nodes without requiring the full dataset to be shared. Empirical results on simulated and benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method performs well in comparison to existing clustering algorithms. We validate the practical utility of the method by applying it to large scale electronic health record (EHR) data.