Sampling-based Continuous Optimization with Coupled Variables for RNA Design

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tang, Wei Yu, Dai, Ning, Zhou, Tianshuo, Mathews, David H., Huang, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929626917371904
author Tang, Wei Yu
Dai, Ning
Zhou, Tianshuo
Mathews, David H.
Huang, Liang
author_facet Tang, Wei Yu
Dai, Ning
Zhou, Tianshuo
Mathews, David H.
Huang, Liang
contents The task of RNA design given a target structure aims to find a sequence that can fold into that structure. It is a computationally hard problem where some version(s) have been proven to be NP-hard. As a result, heuristic methods such as local search have been popular for this task, but by only exploring a fixed number of candidates. They can not keep up with the exponential growth of the design space, and often perform poorly on longer and harder-to-design structures. We instead formulate these discrete problems as continuous optimization, which starts with a distribution over all possible candidate sequences, and uses gradient descent to improve the expectation of an objective function. We define novel distributions based on coupled variables to rule out invalid sequences given the target structure and to model the correlation between nucleotides. To make it universally applicable to any objective function, we use sampling to approximate the expected objective function, to estimate the gradient, and to select the final candidate. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our work consistently outperforms them in key metrics such as Boltzmann probability, ensemble defect, and energy gap, especially on long and hard-to-design puzzles in the Eterna100 benchmark. Our code is available at: http://github.com/weiyutang1010/ncrna_design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08751
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sampling-based Continuous Optimization with Coupled Variables for RNA Design
Tang, Wei Yu
Dai, Ning
Zhou, Tianshuo
Mathews, David H.
Huang, Liang
Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The task of RNA design given a target structure aims to find a sequence that can fold into that structure. It is a computationally hard problem where some version(s) have been proven to be NP-hard. As a result, heuristic methods such as local search have been popular for this task, but by only exploring a fixed number of candidates. They can not keep up with the exponential growth of the design space, and often perform poorly on longer and harder-to-design structures. We instead formulate these discrete problems as continuous optimization, which starts with a distribution over all possible candidate sequences, and uses gradient descent to improve the expectation of an objective function. We define novel distributions based on coupled variables to rule out invalid sequences given the target structure and to model the correlation between nucleotides. To make it universally applicable to any objective function, we use sampling to approximate the expected objective function, to estimate the gradient, and to select the final candidate. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our work consistently outperforms them in key metrics such as Boltzmann probability, ensemble defect, and energy gap, especially on long and hard-to-design puzzles in the Eterna100 benchmark. Our code is available at: http://github.com/weiyutang1010/ncrna_design.
title Sampling-based Continuous Optimization with Coupled Variables for RNA Design
topic Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08751