Category Archives: Code

How to be a Bayesian – ft. a completely ridiculous example

Most of the stats we are exposed to in our formative years as statisticians are viewed through a frequentist lens. Bayesian methods are often viewed with scepticism, perhaps due in part to a lack of understanding over how to specify our prior distribution and perhaps due to uncertainty as to what we should do with the posterior once we’ve got it.

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GitHub Link to Text Mining Tool

I have created a GitHub page to share some of the codes that I used to conduct text mining to extract HBV-related genetic information from PubMed Central. This code is easily adaptable to search through sentences that satisfy your keyword search, so please take a look if you are interested: https://github.com/angoto/HBV_Code.

Note: GitHub page is currently unavailable online, but will be accessible in due course.

SAbBox – the easy way to obtain our antibody tools

A significant part of the work we do here in OPIG revolves around antibodies, the proteins of the immune system that bind to and help remove any foreign entities that find their way into the body. Since antibodies can be developed that target basically anything, they have become extremely useful as therapeutics. In our research, we develop computational tools that can be incorporated into various points along the antibody discovery pipeline. These tools include our database of antibody structures, SAbDab, and a series of predictive tools (e.g. structural modelling algorithms like ABodyBuilder) which are known collectively as SAbPred.

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A Gentle Introduction to the GPyOpt Module

Manually tuning hyperparameters in a neural network is slow and boring. Using Bayesian Optimisation to do it for you is slightly less slower and you can go do other things whilst it’s running. Susan recently highlighted some of the resources available to get to grips with GPyOpt. Below is a copy of a Jupyter Notebook where we walk through a couple of simple examples and hopefully shed a little bit of light on how the algorithm works.

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Three things to help you get started on Bayesian Optimisation

In this blog post I will share with you the materials that I found most useful when I started doing some Bayesian Optimisation in my research. Bear in mind, I am a Chemist by training, so I approached this topic from a non-mathematical background (my eyes have to be persuaded to look at mathematical equations). Out of all the materials I have come across, I found these to be the most accessible. 

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Trying out some code from the Eighth Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics: finding the most common functional groups present in the DSPL library

Last month a bunch of us attended the Sheffield Chemoinformatics Conference. We heard many great presentations and there were many invitations to check out one’s GitHub page. I decided now is the perfect time to try out some code that was shown by one presenter.

Peter Ertl from Novartis presented his work on the The encyclopedia of functional groups. He presented a method that automatically detects functional groups, without the use of a pre-defined list (which is what most other methods use for detecting functional groups). His method involves recursive searching through the molecule to identify groups of atoms that meet certain criteria. He used his method to answer questions such as: how many functional groups are there and what are the most common functional groups found in common synthetic molecules versus bioactive molecules versus natural products. Since I, like many others in the group, are interested in fragment libraries (possibly due to a supervisor in common), I thought I could try it out on one of these.

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