Predictive models – Implementation vs Specification

Benjamin Good recently asked about the existence of public repositories of predictive molecular signatures. From his description, he’s looking for platforms that are capable of deploying predictive models. The need for something like this is certainly not restricted to genomics – the QSAR field has been in need for this for many years. A few years back I described a system to deploy R models and more recently the OCHEM platform attempts to address this. Pipelining tools usually have a web deployment mode that also supports this idea. One problem faced by such platforms in the cheminformatics area is that the deployed model must include the means to evaluate the input features (a.k.a., descriptors). Depending on the licenses associated with descriptor software such a bundle may not be easily deployed. A gene-based predictor obviously doesn’t suffer from this problem, so it should be easier to implement. Benjamin points out the Synapse platform which looks quite nice, but only supports R models (not necessarily a bad thing!). A very recent candidate for generic predictive model (amongst other things) deployment is via plugins for the BARD platform.

But in my mind, the deeper issue that should be addressed is that of model specification. With a robust specification, evaluation of the model could implemented in arbitrary languages and platforms – essentially decoupling model definition and model implementation. PMML is one approach to predictive model specifications and is quite general (and a good solution for the gene predictor models that Benjamin is interested in). A field-specific example would be QSAR-ML(also see here) for QSAR models. One could then imagine repositories of model specifications, with an ecosystem of tools and services that instantiate models from these specs.

One thought on “Predictive models – Implementation vs Specification

  1. Wondering, when the models will available in a parsable form? There are too many duplicate research in molecular modeling, there is a huge lack of reproducibility. I think the main obstacle is not a software or standard, but the unwillingness to share the exact research scheme.

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