Biomedical subjects

Ting Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Ting Chen.

75 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

PubMedDate not supplied

Scalable partitioning and exploration of chemical spaces using geometric hashing.

Virtual screening (VS) has become a preferred tool to augment high-throughput screening(1) and determine new leads in the drug discovery process. The core of a VS informatics pipeline includes several data mining algorithms that work on huge databases of chemical compounds containing millions of molecular structures and their associated data. Thus, scaling traditional applications such as classification, partitioning, and outlier detection for huge chemical data sets without a significant loss in accuracy is very important. In this paper, we introduce a data mining framework built on top of a recently developed fast approximate nearest-neighbor-finding algorithm(2) called locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) that can be used to mine huge chemical spaces in a scalable fashion using very modest computational resources. The core LSH algorithm hashes chemical descriptors so that points close to each other in the descriptor space are also close to each other in the hashed space. Using this data structure, one can perform approximate nearest-neighbor searches very quickly, in sublinear time. We validate the accuracy and performance of our framework on three real data sets of sizes ranging from 4337 to 249 071 molecules. Results indicate that the identification of nearest neighbors using the LSH algorithm is at least 2 orders of magnitude faster than the traditional k-nearest-neighbor method and is over 94% accurate for most query parameters. Furthermore, when viewed as a data-partitioning procedure, the LSH algorithm lends itself to easy parallelization of nearest-neighbor classification or regression. We also apply our framework to detect outlying (diverse) compounds in a given chemical space; this algorithm is extremely rapid in determining whether a compound is located in a sparse region of chemical space or not, and it is quite accurate when compared to results obtained using principal-component-analysis-based heuristics.

Journal Article↗

PubMedDate not supplied

R-NN curves: an intuitive approach to outlier detection using a distance based method.

Libraries of chemical structures are used in a variety of cheminformatics tasks such as virtual screening and QSAR modeling and are generally characterized using molecular descriptors. When working with libraries it is useful to understand the distribution of compounds in the space defined by a set of descriptors. We present a simple approach to the analysis of the spatial distribution of the compounds in a library in general and outlier detection in particular based on counts of neighbors within a series of increasing radii. The resultant curves, termed R-NN curves, appear to follow a logistic model for any given descriptor space, which we justify theoretically for the 2D case. The method can be applied to data sets of arbitrary dimensions. The R-NN curves provide a visual method to easily detect compounds lying in a sparse region of a given descriptor space. We also present a method to numerically characterize the R-NN curves thus allowing identification of outliers in a single plot.

Journal Article↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Local lazy regression: making use of the neighborhood to improve QSAR predictions.

Traditional quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models aim to capture global structure-activity trends present in a data set. In many situations, there may be groups of molecules which exhibit a specific set of features which relate to their activity or inactivity. Such a group of features can be said to represent a local structure-activity relationship. Traditional QSAR models may not recognize such local relationships. In this work, we investigate the use of local lazy regression (LLR), which obtains a prediction for a query molecule using its local neighborhood, rather than considering the whole data set. This modeling approach is especially useful for very large data sets because no a priori model need be built. We applied the technique to three biological data sets. In the first case, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) for an external prediction set was 0.94 log units versus 0.92 log units for the global model. However, LLR was able to characterize a specific group of anomalous molecules with much better accuracy (0.64 log units versus 0.70 log units for the global model). For the second data set, the LLR technique resulted in a decrease in RMSE from 0.36 log units to 0.31 log units for the external prediction set. In the third case, we obtained an RMSE of 2.01 log units versus 2.16 log units for the global model. In all cases, LLR led to a few observations being poorly predicted compared to the global model. We present an analysis of why this was observed and possible improvements to the local regression approach.

Models, Chemical↗