Why risk matters for protein binder design

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cotet, Tudor-Stefan, Krawczuk, Igor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910901404172288
author Cotet, Tudor-Stefan
Krawczuk, Igor
author_facet Cotet, Tudor-Stefan
Krawczuk, Igor
contents Bayesian optimization (BO) has recently become more prevalent in protein engineering applications and hence has become a fruitful target of benchmarks. However, current BO comparisons often overlook real-world considerations like risk and cost constraints. In this work, we compare 72 model combinations of encodings, surrogate models, and acquisition functions on 11 protein binder fitness landscapes, specifically from this perspective. Drawing from the portfolio optimization literature, we adopt metrics to quantify the cold-start performance relative to a random baseline, to assess the risk of an optimization campaign, and to calculate the overall budget required to reach a fitness threshold. Our results suggest the existence of Pareto-optimal models on the risk-performance axis, the shift of this preference depending on the landscape explored, and the robust correlation between landscape properties such as epistasis with the average and worst-case model performance. They also highlight that rigorous model selection requires substantial computational and statistical efforts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00146
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Why risk matters for protein binder design
Cotet, Tudor-Stefan
Krawczuk, Igor
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Bayesian optimization (BO) has recently become more prevalent in protein engineering applications and hence has become a fruitful target of benchmarks. However, current BO comparisons often overlook real-world considerations like risk and cost constraints. In this work, we compare 72 model combinations of encodings, surrogate models, and acquisition functions on 11 protein binder fitness landscapes, specifically from this perspective. Drawing from the portfolio optimization literature, we adopt metrics to quantify the cold-start performance relative to a random baseline, to assess the risk of an optimization campaign, and to calculate the overall budget required to reach a fitness threshold. Our results suggest the existence of Pareto-optimal models on the risk-performance axis, the shift of this preference depending on the landscape explored, and the robust correlation between landscape properties such as epistasis with the average and worst-case model performance. They also highlight that rigorous model selection requires substantial computational and statistical efforts.
title Why risk matters for protein binder design
topic Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00146