Fast and Scalable Gene Embedding Search: A Comparative Study of FAISS and ScaNN

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Refahi, Mohammad Saleh, Hearne, Gavin, Muller, Harrison, Lynch, Kieran, Sokhansanj, Bahrad A., Brown, James R., Rosen, Gail
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Refahi, Mohammad Saleh
Hearne, Gavin
Muller, Harrison
Lynch, Kieran
Sokhansanj, Bahrad A.
Brown, James R.
Rosen, Gail
author_facet Refahi, Mohammad Saleh
Hearne, Gavin
Muller, Harrison
Lynch, Kieran
Sokhansanj, Bahrad A.
Brown, James R.
Rosen, Gail
contents The exponential growth of DNA sequencing data has outpaced traditional heuristic-based methods, which struggle to scale effectively. Efficient computational approaches are urgently needed to support large-scale similarity search, a foundational task in bioinformatics for detecting homology, functional similarity, and novelty among genomic and proteomic sequences. Although tools like BLAST have been widely used and remain effective in many scenarios, they suffer from limitations such as high computational cost and poor performance on divergent sequences. In this work, we explore embedding-based similarity search methods that learn latent representations capturing deeper structural and functional patterns beyond raw sequence alignment. We systematically evaluate two state-of-the-art vector search libraries, FAISS and ScaNN, on biologically meaningful gene embeddings. Unlike prior studies, our analysis focuses on bioinformatics-specific embeddings and benchmarks their utility for detecting novel sequences, including those from uncharacterized taxa or genes lacking known homologs. Our results highlight both computational advantages (in memory and runtime efficiency) and improved retrieval quality, offering a promising alternative to traditional alignment-heavy tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_16978
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast and Scalable Gene Embedding Search: A Comparative Study of FAISS and ScaNN
Refahi, Mohammad Saleh
Hearne, Gavin
Muller, Harrison
Lynch, Kieran
Sokhansanj, Bahrad A.
Brown, James R.
Rosen, Gail
Genomics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The exponential growth of DNA sequencing data has outpaced traditional heuristic-based methods, which struggle to scale effectively. Efficient computational approaches are urgently needed to support large-scale similarity search, a foundational task in bioinformatics for detecting homology, functional similarity, and novelty among genomic and proteomic sequences. Although tools like BLAST have been widely used and remain effective in many scenarios, they suffer from limitations such as high computational cost and poor performance on divergent sequences. In this work, we explore embedding-based similarity search methods that learn latent representations capturing deeper structural and functional patterns beyond raw sequence alignment. We systematically evaluate two state-of-the-art vector search libraries, FAISS and ScaNN, on biologically meaningful gene embeddings. Unlike prior studies, our analysis focuses on bioinformatics-specific embeddings and benchmarks their utility for detecting novel sequences, including those from uncharacterized taxa or genes lacking known homologs. Our results highlight both computational advantages (in memory and runtime efficiency) and improved retrieval quality, offering a promising alternative to traditional alignment-heavy tools.
title Fast and Scalable Gene Embedding Search: A Comparative Study of FAISS and ScaNN
topic Genomics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16978