BioBO: Biology-informed Bayesian Optimization for Perturbation Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Yanke, Cui, Tianyu, Mansi, Tommaso, Prakash, Mangal, Liao, Rui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Yanke
Cui, Tianyu
Mansi, Tommaso
Prakash, Mangal
Liao, Rui
author_facet Li, Yanke
Cui, Tianyu
Mansi, Tommaso
Prakash, Mangal
Liao, Rui
contents Efficient design of genomic perturbation experiments is crucial for accelerating drug discovery and therapeutic target identification, yet exhaustive perturbation of the human genome remains infeasible due to the vast search space of potential genetic interactions and experimental constraints. Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a powerful framework for selecting informative interventions, but existing approaches often fail to exploit domain-specific biological prior knowledge. We propose Biology-Informed Bayesian Optimization (BioBO), a method that integrates Bayesian optimization with multimodal gene embeddings and enrichment analysis, a widely used tool for gene prioritization in biology, to enhance surrogate modeling and acquisition strategies. BioBO combines biologically grounded priors with acquisition functions in a principled framework, which biases the search toward promising genes while maintaining the ability to explore uncertain regions. Through experiments on established public benchmarks and datasets, we demonstrate that BioBO improves labeling efficiency by 25-40%, and consistently outperforms conventional BO by identifying top-performing perturbations more effectively. Moreover, by incorporating enrichment analysis, BioBO yields pathway-level explanations for selected perturbations, offering mechanistic interpretability that links designs to biologically coherent regulatory circuits.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19988
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BioBO: Biology-informed Bayesian Optimization for Perturbation Design
Li, Yanke
Cui, Tianyu
Mansi, Tommaso
Prakash, Mangal
Liao, Rui
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Efficient design of genomic perturbation experiments is crucial for accelerating drug discovery and therapeutic target identification, yet exhaustive perturbation of the human genome remains infeasible due to the vast search space of potential genetic interactions and experimental constraints. Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged as a powerful framework for selecting informative interventions, but existing approaches often fail to exploit domain-specific biological prior knowledge. We propose Biology-Informed Bayesian Optimization (BioBO), a method that integrates Bayesian optimization with multimodal gene embeddings and enrichment analysis, a widely used tool for gene prioritization in biology, to enhance surrogate modeling and acquisition strategies. BioBO combines biologically grounded priors with acquisition functions in a principled framework, which biases the search toward promising genes while maintaining the ability to explore uncertain regions. Through experiments on established public benchmarks and datasets, we demonstrate that BioBO improves labeling efficiency by 25-40%, and consistently outperforms conventional BO by identifying top-performing perturbations more effectively. Moreover, by incorporating enrichment analysis, BioBO yields pathway-level explanations for selected perturbations, offering mechanistic interpretability that links designs to biologically coherent regulatory circuits.
title BioBO: Biology-informed Bayesian Optimization for Perturbation Design
topic Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19988