Inductive queries for a drug designing robot scientist

It is increasingly clear that machine learning algorithms need to be integrated in an iterative scientific discovery loop, in which data is queried repeatedly by means of inductive queries and where the computer provides guidance to the experiments that are being performed. In this chapter, we summarise several key challenges in achieving this integration of machine learning and data mining algorithms in methods for the discovery of Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSARs). We introduce the concept of a robot scientist, in which all steps of the discovery process are automated; we discuss the representation of molecular data such that knowledge discovery tools can analyse it, and we discuss the adaptation of machine learning and data mining algorithms to guide QSAR experiments

Context-aware visual exploration of molecular databases

Facilitating the visual exploration of scientific data has received increasing attention in the past decade or so. Especially in life science related application areas the amount of available data has grown at a breath taking pace. In this paper we describe an approach that allows for visual inspection of large collections of molecular compounds. In contrast to classical visualizations of such spaces we incorporate a specific focus of analysis, for example the outcome of a biological experiment such as high throughout screening results. The presented method uses this experimental data to select molecular fragments of the underlying molecules that have interesting properties and uses the resulting space to generate a two dimensional map based on a singular value decomposition algorithm and a self organizing map. Experiments on real datasets show that the resulting visual landscape groups molecules of similar chemical properties in densely connected regions

Efficient mining of discriminative molecular fragments

Frequent pattern discovery in structured data is receiving an increasing attention in many application areas of sciences. However, the computational complexity and the large amount of data to be explored often make the sequential algorithms unsuitable. In this context high performance distributed computing becomes a very interesting and promising approach. In this paper we present a parallel formulation of the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. The application is characterized by a highly irregular tree-structured computation. No estimation is available for task workloads, which show a power-law distribution in a wide range. The proposed approach allows dynamic resource aggregation and provides fault and latency tolerance. These features make the distributed application suitable for multi-domain heterogeneous environments, such as computational Grids. The distributed application has been evaluated on the well known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening dataset

High performance subgraph mining in molecular compounds

Structured data represented in the form of graphs arises in several fields of the science and the growing amount of available data makes distributed graph mining techniques particularly relevant. In this paper, we present a distributed approach to the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. The problem is characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. We describe the three main aspects of the proposed distributed algorithm, namely a dynamic partitioning of the search space, a distribution process based on a peer-to-peer communication framework, and a novel receiver-initiated, load balancing algorithm. The effectiveness of the distributed method has been evaluated on the well-known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening dataset, where the approach attains close-to linear speedup in a network of workstations

Frequent Subgraph Mining in Outerplanar Graphs

In recent years there has been an increased interest in frequent pattern discovery in large databases of graph structured objects. While the frequent connected subgraph mining problem for tree datasets can be solved in incremental polynomial time, it becomes intractable for arbitrary graph databases. Existing approaches have therefore resorted to various heuristic strategies and restrictions of the search space, but have not identified a practically relevant tractable graph class beyond trees. In this paper, we define the class of so called tenuous outerplanar graphs, a strict generalization of trees, develop a frequent subgraph mining algorithm for tenuous outerplanar graphs that works in incremental polynomial time, and evaluate the algorithm empirically on the NCI molecular graph dataset

Frequent Subgraph Mining in Outerplanar Graphs

In recent years there has been an increased interest in frequent pattern discovery in large databases of graph structured objects. While the frequent connected subgraph mining problem for tree datasets can be solved in incremental polynomial time, it becomes intractable for arbitrary graph databases. Existing approaches have therefore resorted to various heuristic strategies and restrictions of the search space, but have not identified a practically relevant tractable graph class beyond trees. In this paper, we define the class of so called tenuous outerplanar graphs, a strict generalization of trees, develop a frequent subgraph mining algorithm for tenuous outerplanar graphs that works in incremental polynomial time, and evaluate the algorithm empirically on the NCI molecular graph dataset

Finding Characteristic Substructures for Metabolite Classes

We introduce a method for finding a characteristic substructure for a set of molecular structures. Different from common approaches, such as computing the maximum common subgraph, the resulting substructure does not have to be contained in its exact form in all input molecules. Our approach is part of the identification pipeline for unknown metabolites using fragmentation trees. Searching databases using fragmentation tree alignment results in hit lists containing compounds with large structural similarity to the unknown metabolite. The characteristic substructure of the molecules in the hit list may be a key structural element of the unknown compound and might be used as starting point for structure elucidation. We evaluate our method on different data sets and find that it retrieves essential substructures if the input lists are not too heterogeneous. We apply our method to predict structural elements for five unknown samples from Icelandic poppy

Distributed mining of molecular fragments

In real world applications sequential algorithms of data mining and data exploration are often unsuitable for datasets with enormous size, high-dimensionality and complex data structure. Grid computing promises unprecedented opportunities for unlimited computing and storage resources. In this context there is the necessity to develop high performance distributed data mining algorithms. However, the computational complexity of the problem and the large amount of data to be explored often make the design of large scale applications particularly challenging. In this paper we present the first distributed formulation of a frequent subgraph mining algorithm for discriminative fragments of molecular compounds. Two distributed approaches have been developed and compared on the well known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening dataset. We present experimental results on a small-scale computing environment

A maximum common substructure-based algorithm for searching and predicting drug-like compounds

Motivation: The prediction of biologically active compounds is of great importance for high-throughput screening (HTS) approaches in drug discovery and chemical genomics. Many computational methods in this area focus on measuring the structural similarities between chemical structures. However, traditional similarity measures are often too rigid or consider only global similarities between structures. The maximum common substructure (MCS) approach provides a more promising and flexible alternative for predicting bioactive compounds

Dynamic load balancing for the distributed mining of molecular structures

In molecular biology, it is often desirable to find common properties in large numbers of drug candidates. One family of methods stems from the data mining community, where algorithms to find frequent graphs have received increasing attention over the past years. However, the computational complexity of the underlying problem and the large amount of data to be explored essentially render sequential algorithms useless. In this paper, we present a distributed approach to the frequent subgraph mining problem to discover interesting patterns in molecular compounds. This problem is characterized by a highly irregular search tree, whereby no reliable workload prediction is available. We describe the three main aspects of the proposed distributed algorithm, namely, a dynamic partitioning of the search space, a distribution process based on a peer-to-peer communication framework, and a novel receiverinitiated load balancing algorithm. The effectiveness of the distributed method has been evaluated on the well-known National Cancer Institute’s HIV-screening data set, where we were able to show close-to linear speedup in a network of workstations. The proposed approach also allows for dynamic resource aggregation in a non dedicated computational environment. These features make it suitable for large-scale, multi-domain, heterogeneous environments, such as computational grids