To Bin or not to Bin: Alternative Representations of Mass Spectra

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: de Jonge, Niek, van der Hooft, Justin J. J., Probst, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author de Jonge, Niek
van der Hooft, Justin J. J.
Probst, Daniel
author_facet de Jonge, Niek
van der Hooft, Justin J. J.
Probst, Daniel
contents Mass spectrometry, especially so-called tandem mass spectrometry, is commonly used to assess the chemical diversity of samples. The resulting mass fragmentation spectra are representations of molecules of which the structure may have not been determined. This poses the challenge of experimentally determining or computationally predicting molecular structures from mass spectra. An alternative option is to predict molecular properties or molecular similarity directly from spectra. Various methodologies have been proposed to embed mass spectra for further use in machine learning tasks. However, these methodologies require preprocessing of the spectra, which often includes binning or sub-sampling peaks with the main reasoning of creating uniform vector sizes and removing noise. Here, we investigate two alternatives to the binning of mass spectra before down-stream machine learning tasks, namely, set-based and graph-based representations. Comparing the two proposed representations to train a set transformer and a graph neural network on a regression task, respectively, we show that they both perform substantially better than a multilayer perceptron trained on binned data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_10851
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Bin or not to Bin: Alternative Representations of Mass Spectra
de Jonge, Niek
van der Hooft, Justin J. J.
Probst, Daniel
Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Quantitative Methods
J.2; I.2.6
Mass spectrometry, especially so-called tandem mass spectrometry, is commonly used to assess the chemical diversity of samples. The resulting mass fragmentation spectra are representations of molecules of which the structure may have not been determined. This poses the challenge of experimentally determining or computationally predicting molecular structures from mass spectra. An alternative option is to predict molecular properties or molecular similarity directly from spectra. Various methodologies have been proposed to embed mass spectra for further use in machine learning tasks. However, these methodologies require preprocessing of the spectra, which often includes binning or sub-sampling peaks with the main reasoning of creating uniform vector sizes and removing noise. Here, we investigate two alternatives to the binning of mass spectra before down-stream machine learning tasks, namely, set-based and graph-based representations. Comparing the two proposed representations to train a set transformer and a graph neural network on a regression task, respectively, we show that they both perform substantially better than a multilayer perceptron trained on binned data.
title To Bin or not to Bin: Alternative Representations of Mass Spectra
topic Machine Learning
Chemical Physics
Quantitative Methods
J.2; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10851