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Karsten Borgwardt

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Protein Fold Classification at Scale: Benchmarking and Pretraining

Classifying protein topology is essential for deciphering biological function, but progress is held back by the lack of large-scale benchmarks that avoid duplicates and by models that do not scale well. We introduce TEDBench, a large-scale, non-redundant benchmark for protein fold classification constructed from the Encyclopedia of Domains (TED) and Foldseek-clustered AlphaFold structures. We show that on TEDBench, current protein representation learning methods either require very large models or fail to deliver strong performance. To address this challenge, we propose Masked Invariant Autoencoders (MiAE), a self-supervised framework for protein structure representation learning. MiAE uses an extremely high masking ratio of up to 90% with an $\mathrm{SE(3)}$-invariant encoder and a lightweight decoder that reconstructs backbone coordinates from the latent representation and mask tokens. MiAE scales well and outperforms supervised counterparts and state-of-the-art baselines on TEDBench, establishing a strong recipe for protein fold classification. To test transfer beyond AlphaFold structures, we further benchmark on a curated dataset from experimental structures of CATH v4.4. TEDBench is available at https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/TEDBench.

preprint2022arXiv

Approximate Network Motif Mining Via Graph Learning

Frequent and structurally related subgraphs, also known as network motifs, are valuable features of many graph datasets. However, the high computational complexity of identifying motif sets in arbitrary datasets (motif mining) has limited their use in many real-world datasets. By automatically leveraging statistical properties of datasets, machine learning approaches have shown promise in several tasks with combinatorial complexity and are therefore a promising candidate for network motif mining. In this work we seek to facilitate the development of machine learning approaches aimed at motif mining. We propose a formulation of the motif mining problem as a node labelling task. In addition, we build benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics which test the ability of models to capture different aspects of motif discovery such as motif number, size, topology, and scarcity. Next, we propose MotiFiesta, a first attempt at solving this problem in a fully differentiable manner with promising results on challenging baselines. Finally, we demonstrate through MotiFiesta that this learning setting can be applied simultaneously to general-purpose data mining and interpretable feature extraction for graph classification tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Evaluation Metrics for Graph Generative Models: Problems, Pitfalls, and Practical Solutions

Graph generative models are a highly active branch of machine learning. Given the steady development of new models of ever-increasing complexity, it is necessary to provide a principled way to evaluate and compare them. In this paper, we enumerate the desirable criteria for such a comparison metric and provide an overview of the status quo of graph generative model comparison in use today, which predominantly relies on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). We perform a systematic evaluation of MMD in the context of graph generative model comparison, highlighting some of the challenges and pitfalls researchers inadvertently may encounter. After conducting a thorough analysis of the behaviour of MMD on synthetically-generated perturbed graphs as well as on recently-proposed graph generative models, we are able to provide a suitable procedure to mitigate these challenges and pitfalls. We aggregate our findings into a list of practical recommendations for researchers to use when evaluating graph generative models.

preprint2022arXiv

Structure-Aware Transformer for Graph Representation Learning

The Transformer architecture has gained growing attention in graph representation learning recently, as it naturally overcomes several limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs) by avoiding their strict structural inductive biases and instead only encoding the graph structure via positional encoding. Here, we show that the node representations generated by the Transformer with positional encoding do not necessarily capture structural similarity between them. To address this issue, we propose the Structure-Aware Transformer, a class of simple and flexible graph Transformers built upon a new self-attention mechanism. This new self-attention incorporates structural information into the original self-attention by extracting a subgraph representation rooted at each node before computing the attention. We propose several methods for automatically generating the subgraph representation and show theoretically that the resulting representations are at least as expressive as the subgraph representations. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five graph prediction benchmarks. Our structure-aware framework can leverage any existing GNN to extract the subgraph representation, and we show that it systematically improves performance relative to the base GNN model, successfully combining the advantages of GNNs and Transformers. Our code is available at https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/SAT.

preprint2022arXiv

Topological Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful architecture for tackling graph learning tasks, yet have been shown to be oblivious to eminent substructures such as cycles. We present TOGL, a novel layer that incorporates global topological information of a graph using persistent homology. TOGL can be easily integrated into any type of GNN and is strictly more expressive (in terms the Weisfeiler--Lehman graph isomorphism test) than message-passing GNNs. Augmenting GNNs with TOGL leads to improved predictive performance for graph and node classification tasks, both on synthetic data sets, which can be classified by humans using their topology but not by ordinary GNNs, and on real-world data.

preprint2020arXiv

Accelerating COVID-19 Differential Diagnosis with Explainable Ultrasound Image Analysis

Controlling the COVID-19 pandemic largely hinges upon the existence of fast, safe, and highly-available diagnostic tools. Ultrasound, in contrast to CT or X-Ray, has many practical advantages and can serve as a globally-applicable first-line examination technique. We provide the largest publicly available lung ultrasound (US) dataset for COVID-19 consisting of 106 videos from three classes (COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia, and healthy controls); curated and approved by medical experts. On this dataset, we perform an in-depth study of the value of deep learning methods for differential diagnosis of COVID-19. We propose a frame-based convolutional neural network that correctly classifies COVID-19 US videos with a sensitivity of 0.98+-0.04 and a specificity of 0.91+-08 (frame-based sensitivity 0.93+-0.05, specificity 0.87+-0.07). We further employ class activation maps for the spatio-temporal localization of pulmonary biomarkers, which we subsequently validate for human-in-the-loop scenarios in a blindfolded study with medical experts. Aiming for scalability and robustness, we perform ablation studies comparing mobile-friendly, frame- and video-based architectures and show reliability of the best model by aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty estimates. We hope to pave the road for a community effort toward an accessible, efficient and interpretable screening method and we have started to work on a clinical validation of the proposed method. Data and code are publicly available.

preprint2020arXiv

Graph Kernels: State-of-the-Art and Future Challenges

Graph-structured data are an integral part of many application domains, including chemoinformatics, computational biology, neuroimaging, and social network analysis. Over the last two decades, numerous graph kernels, i.e. kernel functions between graphs, have been proposed to solve the problem of assessing the similarity between graphs, thereby making it possible to perform predictions in both classification and regression settings. This manuscript provides a review of existing graph kernels, their applications, software plus data resources, and an empirical comparison of state-of-the-art graph kernels.

preprint2020arXiv

Path Imputation Strategies for Signature Models of Irregular Time Series

The signature transform is a 'universal nonlinearity' on the space of continuous vector-valued paths, and has received attention for use in machine learning on time series. However, real-world temporal data is typically observed at discrete points in time, and must first be transformed into a continuous path before signature techniques can be applied. We make this step explicit by characterising it as an imputation problem, and empirically assess the impact of various imputation strategies when applying signature-based neural nets to irregular time series data. For one of these strategies, Gaussian process (GP) adapters, we propose an extension~(GP-PoM) that makes uncertainty information directly available to the subsequent classifier while at the same time preventing costly Monte-Carlo (MC) sampling. In our experiments, we find that the choice of imputation drastically affects shallow signature models, whereas deeper architectures are more robust. Next, we observe that uncertainty-aware predictions (based on GP-PoM or indicator imputations) are beneficial for predictive performance, even compared to the uncertainty-aware training of conventional GP adapters. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the path construction is indeed crucial for signature models and that our proposed strategy leads to competitive performance in general, while improving robustness of signature models in particular.

preprint2020arXiv

Set Functions for Time Series

Despite the eminent successes of deep neural networks, many architectures are often hard to transfer to irregularly-sampled and asynchronous time series that commonly occur in real-world datasets, especially in healthcare applications. This paper proposes a novel approach for classifying irregularly-sampled time series with unaligned measurements, focusing on high scalability and data efficiency. Our method SeFT (Set Functions for Time Series) is based on recent advances in differentiable set function learning, extremely parallelizable with a beneficial memory footprint, thus scaling well to large datasets of long time series and online monitoring scenarios. Furthermore, our approach permits quantifying per-observation contributions to the classification outcome. We extensively compare our method with existing algorithms on multiple healthcare time series datasets and demonstrate that it performs competitively whilst significantly reducing runtime.

preprint2015arXiv

Searching for significant patterns in stratified data

Significant pattern mining, the problem of finding itemsets that are significantly enriched in one class of objects, is statistically challenging, as the large space of candidate patterns leads to an enormous multiple testing problem. Recently, the concept of testability was proposed as one approach to correct for multiple testing in pattern mining while retaining statistical power. Still, these strategies based on testability do not allow one to condition the test of significance on the observed covariates, which severely limits its utility in biomedical applications. Here we propose a strategy and an efficient algorithm to perform significant pattern mining in the presence of categorical covariates with K states.

preprint2013arXiv

Geometric tree kernels: Classification of COPD from airway tree geometry

Methodological contributions: This paper introduces a family of kernels for analyzing (anatomical) trees endowed with vector valued measurements made along the tree. While state-of-the-art graph and tree kernels use combinatorial tree/graph structure with discrete node and edge labels, the kernels presented in this paper can include geometric information such as branch shape, branch radius or other vector valued properties. In addition to being flexible in their ability to model different types of attributes, the presented kernels are computationally efficient and some of them can easily be computed for large datasets (N of the order 10.000) of trees with 30-600 branches. Combining the kernels with standard machine learning tools enables us to analyze the relation between disease and anatomical tree structure and geometry. Experimental results: The kernels are used to compare airway trees segmented from low-dose CT, endowed with branch shape descriptors and airway wall area percentage measurements made along the tree. Using kernelized hypothesis testing we show that the geometric airway trees are significantly differently distributed in patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) than in healthy individuals. The geometric tree kernels also give a significant increase in the classification accuracy of COPD from geometric tree structure endowed with airway wall thickness measurements in comparison with state-of-the-art methods, giving further insight into the relationship between airway wall thickness and COPD. Software: Software for computing kernels and statistical tests is available at http://image.diku.dk/aasa/software.php.

preprint2012arXiv

A mixed model approach for joint genetic analysis of alternatively spliced transcript isoforms using RNA-Seq data

RNA-Seq technology allows for studying the transcriptional state of the cell at an unprecedented level of detail. Beyond quantification of whole-gene expression, it is now possible to disentangle the abundance of individual alternatively spliced transcript isoforms of a gene. A central question is to understand the regulatory processes that lead to differences in relative abundance variation due to external and genetic factors. Here, we present a mixed model approach that allows for (i) joint analysis and genetic mapping of multiple transcript isoforms and (ii) mapping of isoform-specific effects. Central to our approach is to comprehensively model the causes of variation and correlation between transcript isoforms, including the genomic background and technical quantification uncertainty. As a result, our method allows to accurately test for shared as well as transcript-specific genetic regulation of transcript isoforms and achieves substantially improved calibration of these statistical tests. Experiments on genotype and RNA-Seq data from 126 human HapMap individuals demonstrate that our model can help to obtain a more fine-grained picture of the genetic basis of gene expression variation.

preprint2012arXiv

easyGWAS: An integrated interspecies platform for performing genome-wide association studies

Motivation: The rapid growth in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in plants and animals has brought about the need for a central resource that facilitates i) performing GWAS, ii) accessing data and results of other GWAS, and iii) enabling all users regardless of their background to exploit the latest statistical techniques without having to manage complex software and computing resources. Results: We present easyGWAS, a web platform that provides methods, tools and dynamic visualizations to perform and analyze GWAS. In addition, easyGWAS makes it simple to reproduce results of others, validate findings, and access larger sample sizes through merging of public datasets. Availability: Detailed method and data descriptions as well as tutorials are available in the supplementary materials. easyGWAS is available at http://easygwas.tuebingen.mpg.de/. Contact: dominik.grimm@tuebingen.mpg.de

preprint2012arXiv

LMM-Lasso: A Lasso Multi-Marker Mixed Model for Association Mapping with Population Structure Correction

Exploring the genetic basis of heritable traits remains one of the central challenges in biomedical research. In simple cases, single polymorphic loci explain a significant fraction of the phenotype variability. However, many traits of interest appear to be subject to multifactorial control by groups of genetic loci instead. Accurate detection of such multivariate associations is nontrivial and often hindered by limited power. At the same time, confounding influences such as population structure cause spurious association signals that result in false positive findings if they are not accounted for in the model. Here, we propose LMM-Lasso, a mixed model that allows for both, multi-locus mapping and correction for confounding effects. Our approach is simple and free of tuning parameters, effectively controls for population structure and scales to genome-wide datasets. We show practical use in genome-wide association studies and linkage mapping through retrospective analyses. In data from Arabidopsis thaliana and mouse, our method is able to find a genetic cause for significantly greater fractions of phenotype variation in 91% of the phenotypes considered. At the same time, our model dissects this variability into components that result from individual SNP effects and population structure. In addition to this increase of genetic heritability, enrichment of known candidate genes suggests that the associations retrieved by LMM-Lasso are more likely to be genuine.