SCIENTIFIC PYTHON 2013, DAY 1: BIOINFORMATICS, IPYTHON

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I’m at the 2013 Scientific Python conference in beautiful Austin, Texas. I’m helping organize this year’s Bioinformatics Symposium and learning about Python scaling and reproducibility from the Scientific Python community. These are my notes from the first day.

FERNANDO PEREZ – IPYTHON OVERVIEW

Fernando’s IPython talk describes the methods driving IPython development. He runs his talk inside an IPython notebook for major bonus points. The lifecycle of scientific work is to explore, collaboratively develop, parallelize, publish and educate. The entire process is fluid and moves backwards as we explore new ideas.
Fernando walks through the history of IPython, including showing the entire 200 lines of source code from the first version. Current cool tools include:
Nice discussion of IPython parallel and StarCluster for scaling. Current scaling target for IPython is jobs up to thousands of nodes, not for larger 10k+ node clusters.
Nice discussion of lessons on building the IPython community and engaging external developers. Open to new ideas from outside members. Have full group meetings on Google+ that are available for anyone to view and comment on.

GAËL VAROQUAUX – SIMPLE PYTHON PATTERNS FOR LARGE DATA PROCESSING

Gaël’s talk focuses on simple python patterns to deal with big data. Focuses on alternatives to Hadoop because of limitations of installability on traditional academic clusters. Toolkit is SciPy, NumPy and Joblib. His approach to work: provide easy to debug failures, avoid solving hard problems if you can still get your work done with easier solutions, dependencies are troublesome because of installation problems.
One way to improve speed is to reduce dimensions by reducing features, with approaches like sklearn.random.projection.
Parallel processing patterns with focus on embarrassingly parallel loops. Right scale needs to avoid competing for resources: disk and memory. joblib.Parallel uses queues for dispatch jobs. Would like to move to a job management solution that helps scaling up.
Caching is important to handle re-computing. joblib has a memoize pattern that handles large data inputs by using hashes for inputs. Uses disk-based persistence.
How to make IO fast: use fast compression to use more CPU and access sections of data. BAMs blocked gzip approach is a good example of this in bioinformatics. On the python side, pytables handles this.
More meta point in the talk: take seriously the cost of complexity in your code.

LEIF JOHNSON – TOOLS FOR CODING AND FEATURE LEARNING

Leif’s talk focuses on machine learning approaches to coding complex features into simple, easier to process alternatives. The two main advantages: easier classification and provides better interpretability of complex data. Simplest way to code is to project your data into the columns of a coding matrix, which preserves the dimensionality of the data.Sparse coding is a good general approach to doing this. Principle Component Analysis is widely used but some datasets fail assumptions.
For subsampling, a good compromise is k-means to minimize without excessive bias.Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), specifically MORB implementation are worth looking at as well. Uses Theano to optimize under the covers.
Algorithms help you learn similar things but the tricky part is emphasizing how to encode your data.

OLIVIER GRISEL – TRENDS IN MACHINE LEARNING

Olivier’s talk focuses on scikit-learn blackbox models, probabilistic programming withPyMC, and deep learning with PyLearn2 and Theano. scikit-learn is a blackbox library and provides a unified API on top of multiple classifiers. Handles multiple inputs for classifiers: binary inputs, multitype inputs, higher level features extracted on top of raw data.
Limitations of machine learning as a blackbox. Feature extraction is highly domain specific. Models make statistical assumptions which may not hold for your specific data. Need tools to be able to differentiate which approaches to take. Flow chart on using machine learning models help with this problem. The second problem is that blackbox models can’t explain what they learned. It might work but you don’t know why.
Probabilistic programming with generic inference engines helps avoid the lack of explainability problem. This models unknown causes with random variables, using Bayesian approaches to identify. MCMC is the most widely used approach. Infer.py talk later on using Variational message passing (VMP) approach. Probabilistic programming has lots of benefits related to telling a story around the data but issues are up front in learning how to build models and choose priors.
Third approach is deep learning: deep = architectural depth. It emphasizes the number of layers between inputs and outputs: linear models have depth 0, neural networks and decision trees have depth 1, and ensembles and two-layer neural networks have depth 2. Depth 0 handles linearly separable data, depth 1 solves the XOR problem, depth 2 solves the XOR problem in multiple dimensions. Depth 2 power is why Ensemble trees have been so successful on more difficult problems.
More complicated models have multiple hidden representations via RBMs: unsupervised training approach. Dropout approach trains neural networks with less overfitting. All of this recent code in PyLearn2. Deep learning requires a lot of labeled data and GPU enabled code to be practical to run. Lots of research ongoing in this area.

BRIAN GRANGER – SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN IPYTHON

Brian is talking about software engineering in IPython and what they’ve learned from multiple rounds of revisions. Brian wrote the current version of IPython notebook by leaving out lots of features in earlier versions that proved unmaintainable. General idea is to avoid over-architecting because features have hidden costs, due to developer time being a limited resource. Need a rational process for deciding how to spend developer time. Why are features problematic:
  • add complexity to code: makes it harder to understand and hack
  • adds potential bugs
  • requires documentation
  • requires support
  • requires developers to specialize
  • add complexity to the user experience
  • features multiple like bunnies and are difficult to remove once implemented
Features have costs that need counting. Need to identify the simplest possible implementation that would be useful.
The hidden benefits of bugs: they’re a sign that people are using your software and tell you what features are useful. They’re an opportunity to improve testing of software.
This all requires a cultural solution. Hard to say no to enthusiastic developers and users. Approaches to ameliorate this:
  • Create a roadmap that discusses features/plans
  • Decide on a scope or vision for a project and communicate this

ROB ZINKOV – INFER.PY

Rob discusses a python interface to Infer.NET, a framework for Bayesian inference using graphical models. Infer.py allows you to stay in the python ecosystem but call out to .NET. It’s not a iron-python wrapper in which you’d lose a lot of familiar python tools. TheGitHub examples directory provides useful code to get started with the tool. Rob does a nice live demo that interacts with Infer.NET and matplotlib. Advantage of this over PyMC is that it provides non-MC code that can parallelize via message passing.

CHRIS BEAUMONT – GLUE VISUALIZATION

Chris’ talk discusses the Glue visualization framework. He differentiates different types of data expansion: big data = more data, and wide data = more experiments to integrate together. Most tools orient towards single datasets since the integration work is tricky and error prone. Glue provides multiple views on multiple datasets with linking, all in Python. Glue is a GUI that sits on top of matplotlib. By specifying logical connections between datasets, you can link multiple datasets and interactively select subsets and plot together. Glue interacts nicely with IPython notebook: can use qglue to go from IPython straight into Glue.

BIOINFORMATICS MINI-SYMPOSIUM

I’m chairing this session as well so these notes are extra scattered.
Aaron Quinlan talked about GEMINI, a framework for annotating and querying genomic variations.
Ryan Dale talked about metaseq, a framework for integrated plotting and analysis of ChIP-seq/RNA-seq data. Gives you a pure python approach to plotting and analysis, including parallelization over multiple cores using multiprocessing. Can ask questions like how do peaks cluster around transcription start sites: cluster with k-means from scikit-learn. metaseq also handles large tables like RNA-seq count results by wrapping pandas.
Brent Pedersen talked about his poverlap library to look for significance testing of intervals: do two sets of intervals overlap more than expected? poverlap wraps and parallelizes all of the work and provides a simple interface to add locality to shuffling and restrict by genomic regions. Can handle different null models: does transcription factor A overlap with B more than C. Allows you to calculate custom metrics during processing in arbitrary languages. Parallelizes with multiprocessing and IPython.
Blake Borgeson described a use case of machine learning in bioinformatics: identifying protein complexes from mass spectroscopy data. Separate based on charge, density and size. Integrates prior knowledge of existing interactions. So features of machine learning are priors plus mass spec output. Uses scikit-learn and clustering tools (clusterOne and MCL) to separate. See cool differences in interactions for different evolutionary subsets.
Pat Francis-Lyon describes her work identifying gene interactions with the goal of identifying pathways for therapies. Defining interactions is hard: difficult to define what you mean by interactions. Shows nice examples of interactions under different models: additive and multiplicative interactions. Used genomeSIMLA to simulate genetic data under many different genetic models. Used multiple supervised learning methods: SVM and neural networks.
Jacob Barhak talked about a tool to support modeling of diseases. Micro-simulation simulates individuals then combines then together into a picture of the population. By extracting MIST from a previous toolkit, they simplified installation to make it more widely useful. MIST provides a simulation language that it compiles into a Python script. Allows users to define arbitrary input rules and define distributions of population values.

COOL IDEAS FROM DISCUSSIONS

The best part of a conference is tips and tricks from discussions with other developers. Here are some ideas to explore that I picked up during conversations and lightning talks: