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Biomedical subjects

Ilias Tagkopoulos

Publications and source records attributed to Ilias Tagkopoulos.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Predicting food taste with bound-driven optimization.

The prediction of sensory attributes from ingredient-level formulations is an emerging challenge at the intersection of food science and artificial intelligence. We address the fundamental question of whether the taste of a food can be predicted from its ingredients by treating recipes as composite materials. We apply Hashin-Shtrikman (HS) and Reuss-Voigt (RV) bounds, techniques originally developed for elastic moduli, as a null-hypothesis additive baseline for five taste dimensions (sweetness, sourness, bitterness, umami, saltiness) on a curated dataset of 70 recipes decomposed into 115 distinct ingredients scored against a library of 209 ingredient-level taste references with trained-panel ground truth. This baseline systematically under-predicts perceived taste: 77% of actual taste values exceeded the HS upper bound, with the exceedance rate ranging from 26% (bitterness) to 97% (saltiness). We traced this gap to specific processing chemistry (Maillard reactions, caramelization, evaporative concentration, protein hydrolysis, and nucleotide synergy) and introduced a hybrid model that augments the HS baseline with eight chemistry-proxy features encoding these mechanisms. Our results show that our interpretable hybrid model eliminates the systematic bias and reduces mean absolute error by 27%-62% for sweetness, sourness, umami, and saltiness while using only 10 interpretable features, achieving performance comparable to a black-box Lasso regression on 115 per-ingredient features. We further demonstrate constrained inverse design via Differential Evolution, recovering ingredient formulations that match target taste profiles subject to compositional bounds. Our work demonstrates how key chemical processes during food preparation can inform and augment physics-based and machine learning models, providing a quantitative fingerprint of processing chemistry's contribution to taste perception and paving the way for model-driven food formulation with targeted sensory characteristics.

Composite material bounds↗

Symmetric and asymmetric multi-modality biclustering analysis for microarray data matrix.

Machine learning techniques offer a viable approach to cluster discovery from microarray data, which involves identifying and classifying biologically relevant groups in genes and conditions. It has been recognized that genes (whether or not they belong to the same gene group) may be co-expressed via a variety of pathways. Therefore, they can be adequately described by a diversity of coherence models. In fact, it is known that a gene may participate in multiple pathways that may or may not be co-active under all conditions. It is therefore biologically meaningful to simultaneously divide genes into functional groups and conditions into co-active categories--leading to the so-called biclustering analysis. For this, we have proposed a comprehensive set of coherence models to cope with various plausible regulation processes. Furthermore, a multivariate biclustering analysis based on fusion of different coherence models appears to be promising because the expression level of genes from the same group may follow more than one coherence models. The simulation studies further confirm that the proposed framework enjoys the advantage of high prediction performance.

Algorithms↗

Multi-metric and multi-substructure biclustering analysis for gene expression data.

A good number of biclustering algorithms have been proposed for grouping gene expression data. Many of them have adopted matrix norms to define the similarity score of a bicluster. We shall show that almost all matrix metrics can be converted into vector norms while preserving the rank equivalence. Vector norms provide a much more efficient vehicle for biclustering analysis and computation. The advantages are two folds: ease of analysis and saving of computation. Most existing biclustering algorithms have also implicitly assumed the use of univariate (i.e., single metric) evaluation for identifying biclusters. Such an approach however overlooks the fundamental principle that genes (even though they may belong to the same gene group) (1) may be subdivided into different substructures; and (2) they may be co-expressed via a diversity of coherence models (a gene may participate in multiple pathways that may or may not be co-active under all conditions). The former leads to the adoption of a multi-substurcture analysis, while the latter to the multivariate analysis. This paper will show that the proposed multivariate and multi-subscluster analysis is very effective in identifying and classifying biologically relevant groups in genes and conditions. For example, it has successfully yielded highly discriminant and accurate classification based on known ribosomal gene groups.

Algorithms↗