Scalable Batch Correction for Cell Painting via Batch-Dependent Kernels and Adaptive Sampling

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ravi, Aditya Narayan, Vadvalkar, Snehal, Pandey, Abhishek, Shomorony, Ilan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Ravi, Aditya Narayan
Vadvalkar, Snehal
Pandey, Abhishek
Shomorony, Ilan
author_facet Ravi, Aditya Narayan
Vadvalkar, Snehal
Pandey, Abhishek
Shomorony, Ilan
contents Cell Painting is a microscopy-based, high-content imaging assay that produces rich morphological profiles of cells and can support drug discovery by quantifying cellular responses to chemical perturbations. At scale, however, Cell Painting data is strongly affected by batch effects arising from differences in laboratories, instruments, and protocols, which can obscure biological signal. We present BALANS (Batch Alignment via Local Affinities and Subsampling), a scalable batch-correction method that aligns samples across batches by constructing a smoothed affinity matrix from pairwise distances. Given $n$ data points, BALANS builds a sparse affinity matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ using two ideas. (i) For points $i$ and $j$, it sets a local scale using the distance from $i$ to its $k$-th nearest neighbor within the batch of $j$, then computes $A_{ij}$ via a Gaussian kernel calibrated by these batch-aware local scales. (ii) Rather than forming all $n^2$ entries, BALANS uses an adaptive sampling procedure that prioritizes rows with low cumulative neighbor coverage and retains only the strongest affinities per row, yielding a sparse but informative approximation of $A$. We prove that this sampling strategy is order-optimal in sample complexity and provides an approximation guarantee, and we show that BALANS runs in nearly linear time in $n$. Experiments on diverse real-world Cell Painting datasets and controlled large-scale synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that BALANS scales to large collections while improving runtime over native implementations of widely used batch-correction methods, without sacrificing correction quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Batch Correction for Cell Painting via Batch-Dependent Kernels and Adaptive Sampling
Ravi, Aditya Narayan
Vadvalkar, Snehal
Pandey, Abhishek
Shomorony, Ilan
Machine Learning
Computation
Cell Painting is a microscopy-based, high-content imaging assay that produces rich morphological profiles of cells and can support drug discovery by quantifying cellular responses to chemical perturbations. At scale, however, Cell Painting data is strongly affected by batch effects arising from differences in laboratories, instruments, and protocols, which can obscure biological signal. We present BALANS (Batch Alignment via Local Affinities and Subsampling), a scalable batch-correction method that aligns samples across batches by constructing a smoothed affinity matrix from pairwise distances. Given $n$ data points, BALANS builds a sparse affinity matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ using two ideas. (i) For points $i$ and $j$, it sets a local scale using the distance from $i$ to its $k$-th nearest neighbor within the batch of $j$, then computes $A_{ij}$ via a Gaussian kernel calibrated by these batch-aware local scales. (ii) Rather than forming all $n^2$ entries, BALANS uses an adaptive sampling procedure that prioritizes rows with low cumulative neighbor coverage and retains only the strongest affinities per row, yielding a sparse but informative approximation of $A$. We prove that this sampling strategy is order-optimal in sample complexity and provides an approximation guarantee, and we show that BALANS runs in nearly linear time in $n$. Experiments on diverse real-world Cell Painting datasets and controlled large-scale synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that BALANS scales to large collections while improving runtime over native implementations of widely used batch-correction methods, without sacrificing correction quality.
title Scalable Batch Correction for Cell Painting via Batch-Dependent Kernels and Adaptive Sampling
topic Machine Learning
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22331