Drug Discovery under Covariate Shift with Domain-Informed Prior Distributions over Functions

Published: 20 Jun 2023, Last Modified: 18 Jul 2023AABI 2023 - Fast TrackEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: Drug Discovery, Covariate Shift, Generalization, Variational Inference, Uncertainty Quantification, Deep Learning
TL;DR: This paper proposes a variational method for encoding domain knowledge about the input data space into supervised learning for drug discovery.
Abstract: Accelerating the discovery of novel and more effective therapeutics is an important pharmaceutical problem in which deep learning is playing an increasingly significant role. However, real-world drug discovery tasks are often characterized by a scarcity of labeled data and significant covariate shift---a setting that poses a challenge to standard deep learning methods. In this paper, we present Q-SAVI, a probabilistic model able to address these challenges by encoding explicit prior knowledge of the data-generating process into a prior distribution over functions, presenting researchers with a transparent and probabilistically principled way to encode data-driven modeling preferences. Building on a novel, gold-standard bioactivity dataset that facilitates a meaningful comparison of models in an extrapolative regime, we explore different approaches to induce data shift and construct a challenging evaluation setup. We then demonstrate that using Q-SAVI to integrate contextualized prior knowledge of drug-like chemical space into the modeling process affords substantial gains in predictive accuracy and calibration, outperforming a broad range of state-of-the-art self-supervised pre-training and domain adaptation techniques.
Publication Venue: ICML 2023
Submission Number: 10
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