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When Does Gene Regulatory Network Inference Break? A Controlled Diagnostic Study of Causal and Correlational Methods on Single-Cell Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Despite theoretical advantages, causal methods for Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) inference from single-cell RNA-seq data consistently fail to match or outperform correlation-based baselines in many realistic benchmarks, a persistent puzzle which casts doubt on the value of causality for this task. We argue that existing benchmarks are insufficiently controlled to answer this question because they evaluate on real or semi-real data where multiple pathologies co-occur, confounding failure modes, and obscuring the specific conditions under which different inference methods excel or fail. To address this gap, we introduce a controlled diagnostic framework that isolates seven biologically motivated pathologies (dropout, latent confounders, cell-type mixing, feedback loops, network density, sample size, and pseudotime drift) and measure how six representative methods spanning three inference paradigms degrade as each pathology intensifies. Across 6,120 controlled experiments, we find that causal methods genuinely dominate in clean and structurally favorable regimes, but specific pathologies (notably dropout and latent confounders) selectively neutralize their advantages. We further introduce an errortype decomposition that reveals methods with similar aggregate accuracy commit qualitatively different errors. To probe whether single-pathology effects persist when multiple stressors co-occur, we perform an interaction sweep over the three most impactful pathologies and find that their joint effects are sub-additive, while also exposing density-conditional cross-overs invisible to single-dial analysis. Our findings offer a nuanced understanding of when and why different methods succeed or fail for GRN inference, providing actionable insights for method development and practical guidance for practitioners.3



e464656edca5e58850f8cec98cbb979b-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

To be consistent with accuracy definition, we denote the correctness ofstj for instance t as sim(stj,rt) = ( 2 distance(stj,rt))/ 2 where sim(stj,rt) is in the range [0,1] and distance(stj,rt) is in range [0, 2], 2 is the largest Euclidean distance in the probability simplex. Given a test dataset I, the correctness of a learner SLj on I can be denoted as 2 corrSLj = 1n Pn t=1sim(stj,rt). In this section, we define multiple metrics for consistency, accuracy, and correct-consistency in detail. Figure 1 shows the metrics computation in our experiments. We have created a git repository for this work and will be posted upon the acceptance and publicationofthiswork.





1006ff12c465532f8c574aeaa4461b16-Paper.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We develop a method to generate prediction intervals that have a user-specified coverage level across all regions of feature-space, a property calledconditional coverage.


Australia's beloved weather website got a makeover - and infuriated users

BBC News

Australia's beloved weather website got a makeover - and infuriated users It was an unseasonably warm spring day in Sydney on 22 October, with a forecast of 39C (99F) - a real scorcher. The day before, the state of New South Wales had reported its hottest day in over a century, a high of 44.8C in the outback town of Bourke. But little did the team at the national Bureau of Meteorology foresee that they, in particular, would soon be feeling the heat. Affectionately known by Australians as the Bom, the agency's long-awaited website redesign went live that morning, more than a decade after the last update. Within hours, the Bom was flooded with a deluge of complaints.


Are You There God? Lightweight Narrative Annotation of Christian Fiction with LMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In addition to its more widely studied cultural movements, American Evangelicalism has a well-developed but less externally visible literary side. Christian Fiction, however, has been little studied, and what scholarly attention there is has focused on the explosively popular Left Behind series. In this work, we use computational tools to provide both a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction as a genre and a more directed exploration of how its authors depict divine acts. Working with human annotators, we first developed a codebook for identifying "acts of God." We then adapted the codebook for use by a recent, lightweight LM with the assistance of a much larger model. The laptop-scale LM is largely capable of matching human annotations, even when the task is subtle and challenging. Using these annotations, we show that significant and meaningful differences exist between divine acts depicted by the Left Behind books and Christian Fiction more broadly.


A Multimodal Deep Learning Approach for White Matter Shape Prediction in Diffusion MRI Tractography

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Shape measures have emerged as promising descriptors of white matter tractography, offering complementary insights into anatomical variability and associations with cognitive and clinical phenotypes. However, conventional methods for computing shape measures are computationally expensive and time-consuming for large-scale datasets due to reliance on voxel-based representations. We propose Tract2Shape, a novel multimodal deep learning framework that leverages geometric (point cloud) and scalar (tabular) features to predict ten white matter tractography shape measures. To enhance model efficiency, we utilize a dimensionality reduction algorithm for the model to predict five primary shape components. The model is trained and evaluated on two independently acquired datasets, the HCP-YA dataset, and the PPMI dataset. We evaluate the performance of Tract2Shape by training and testing it on the HCP-YA dataset and comparing the results with state-of-the-art models. To further assess its robustness and generalization ability, we also test Tract2Shape on the unseen PPMI dataset. Tract2Shape outperforms SOTA deep learning models across all ten shape measures, achieving the highest average Pearson's r and the lowest nMSE on the HCP-YA dataset. The ablation study shows that both multimodal input and PCA contribute to performance gains. On the unseen testing PPMI dataset, Tract2Shape maintains a high Pearson's r and low nMSE, demonstrating strong generalizability in cross-dataset evaluation. Tract2Shape enables fast, accurate, and generalizable prediction of white matter shape measures from tractography data, supporting scalable analysis across datasets. This framework lays a promising foundation for future large-scale white matter shape analysis.