Mihaela van der SchaarSee also our related Research Pillars:
Research Pillar on Clinical Trials
Research Pillar on ITE
Our belief at the van der Schaar lab is that the integration of machine learning with pharmacology is unlocking new frontiers in personalised medicine and clinical trials. Below we highlight how, by working closely with pharmacologists from all over the world over the past 5 years, we have developed cutting-edge machine learning which can transform predictive modelling for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, enable precision dosing that is personalised to the patient, and change the way information is extracted from clinical trials to enable treatment and dose personalisation to better treat patients. The publications listed on this page showcase our latest research in applying advanced ML techniques to pharmacological challenges, highlighting how these computational tools are not only accelerating the pace of discovery but also enhancing the precision of therapeutic interventions.
We are excited about numerous other opportunities to join forces to enable this transformation. If you are a pharmacologist interested in doing joint research and collaborating with us or if you would like to provide us feedback, please reach out here.
Data-Driven Discovery of Dynamical Systems in Pharmacology using Large Language Models
S Holt, Z Qian, T Liu, J Weatherall, M van der Schaar
NeurIPS 2024
Abstract
Discovering the true underlying pharmacological processes that evolve over time is of significant interest to pharmacometricians and healthcare professionals. Accurate and interpretable modeling of these processes is crucial for understanding disease-drug interactions, optimizing medication dosing, and minimizing adverse health effects, such as in chemotherapy where precise dosing can maximize cancer cell eradication while minimizing patient harm. Current models, often developed by human experts, are limited by their high cost, lack of scalability, and restriction to existing human knowledge.
In this paper, we present the Data-Driven Discovery (D3) framework, a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively discover and refine interpretable models of pharmacological dynamics. Unlike traditional methods, D3 enables the LLM to propose, acquire and integrate new features, validate, and compare pharmacological dynamical systems models, thereby uncovering new insights into pharmacokinetic processes.
We demonstrate that D3 can identify well-fitting, interpretable models across diverse pharmacokinetic datasets. Specifically, experiments on a real pharmacokinetic Warfarin dataset reveal that D3 uncovers a new plausible pharmacokinetic model that outperforms existing literature, highlighting its potential for precision dosing in clinical applications.
ODE Discovery for Longitudinal Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Inference
K Kacprzyk, S Holt, J Berrevoets, Z Qian, M van der Schaar
ICLR 2024
Abstract
Inferring unbiased treatment effects has received widespread attention in the machine learning community. In recent years, our community has proposed numerous solutions in standard settings, high-dimensional treatment settings, and even longitudinal settings. While very diverse, the solution has mostly relied on neural networks for inference and simultaneous correction of assignment bias.
New approaches typically build on top of previous approaches by proposing new (or refined) architectures and learning algorithms. However, the end result — a neural-network-based inference machine — remains unchallenged. In this paper, we introduce a different type of solution in the longitudinal setting: a closed-form ordinary differential equation (ODE). While we still rely on continuous optimization to learn an ODE, the resulting inference machine is no longer a neural network.
Doing so yields several advantages such as interpretability, irregular sampling, and a different set of identification assumptions. Above all, we consider the introduction of a completely new type of solution to be our most important contribution as it may spark entirely new innovations in treatment effects in general. We facilitate this by formulating our contribution as a framework that can transform any ODE discovery method into a treatment effects method.
Deep Generative Symbolic Regression
S Holt, Z Qian, M van der Schaar
ICLR 2023
Abstract
Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover concise closed-form mathematical equations from data, a task fundamental to scientific discovery. However, the problem is highly challenging because closed-form equations lie in a complex combinatorial search space.
Existing methods, ranging from heuristic search to reinforcement learning, fail to scale with the number of input variables. We make the observation that closed-form equations often have structural characteristics and invariances (e.g., the commutative law) that could be further exploited to build more effective symbolic regression solutions. Motivated by this observation, our key contribution is to leverage pre-trained deep generative models to capture the intrinsic regularities of equations, thereby providing a solid foundation for subsequent optimization steps.
We show that our novel formalism unifies several prominent approaches of symbolic regression and offers a new perspective to justify and improve on the previous ad hoc designs, such as the usage of cross-entropy loss during pre-training. Specifically, we propose an instantiation of our framework, Deep Generative Symbolic Regression (DGSR). In our experiments, we show that DGSR achieves a higher recovery rate of true equations in the setting of a larger number of input variables, and it is more computationally efficient at inference time than state-of-the-art RL symbolic regression solutions.
The potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in clinical pharmacology
M Johnson, M Patel, A Phipps, M van der Schaar, D Boulton, M Gibbs
CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology 2023
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) involves using data and algorithms to perform activities normally achieved through human intelligence. AI and its key component machine learning contextualize data and enhance decision making to transform how we operate, discover, and develop drugs.
Transforming clinical pharmacology (CP) as AI‐augmented CP (AI/CP) requires an ecosystem including digitized data collection, standardized processes, complementary technologies, and an ethical framework. This commentary aims to highlight the future perspectives of AI/CP in drug development.
Synthetic Model Combination: A new machine-learning method for pharmacometric model ensembling
A Chan, R Peck. M Gibbs, M van der Schaar
CPT: Pharmacometrics & Systems Pharmacology 2023
Abstract
When aiming to make predictions over targets in the pharmacological setting, a data-focused approach aims to learn models based on a collection of labeled examples. Unfortunately, data sharing is not always possible, and this can result in many different models trained on disparate populations, leading to the natural question of how best to use and combine them when making a new prediction.
Previous work has focused on global model selection or ensembling, with the result of a single final model across the feature space. Machine-learning models perform notoriously poorly on data outside their training domain, however, due to a problem known as covariate shift, and so we argue that when ensembling models the weightings for individual instances must reflect their respective domains—in other words, models that are more likely to have seen information on that instance should have more attention paid to them. We introduce a method for such an instance-wise ensembling of models called Synthetic Model Combination (SMC), including a novel representation learning step for handling sparse high-dimensional domains.
We demonstrate the use of SMC on an example with dosing predictions for vancomycin, although emphasize the applicability of the method to any scenario involving the use of multiple models.
Bridging the Worlds of Pharmacometrics and Machine Learning
K Stankeviciute, J-B Woillard, R Peck, P Marquet, M van der Schaar
Clinical Pharmacokinetics 2023
Abstract
Precision medicine requires individualised modeling of disease and drug dynamics, with machine learning-based computational techniques gaining increasing popularity. The complexity of either field, however, makes current pharmacological problems opaque to machine learning practitioners, and state-of-the-art machine learningmethods inaccessible to pharmacometricians.
To help bridge the two worlds, we provide an introduction to current problems and techniques in pharmacometrics that ranges from pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic modeling to pharmacometric simulations, model-informed precision dosing, and systems pharmacology, and review some of the machine learning approaches to address them.
We hope this would facilitate collaboration between experts, with complementary strengths of principled pharmacometric modeling and flexibility of machine learning leading to synergistic effects in pharmacological applications.
Using Machine Learning to Individualize Treatment Effect Estimation: Challenges and Opportunities
A Curth, R Peck, E McKinney, J Weatherall, M van der Schaar
Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 2023
Abstract
The use of data from randomized clinical trials to justify treatment decisions for real-world patients is the current state of the art. It relies on the assumption that average treatment effects from the trial can be extrapolated to patients with personal and/or disease characteristics different from those treated in the trial.
Yet, because of heterogeneity of treatment effects between patients and between the trial population and real-world patients, this assumption may not be correct for many patients. Using machine learning to estimate the expected conditional average treatment effect (CATE) in individual patients from observational data offers the potential for more accurate estimation of the expected treatment effects in each patient based on their observed characteristics.
In this review, we discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for machine learning to estimate CATE, including ensuring identification assumptions are met, managing covariate shift, and learning without access to the true label of interest. We also discuss the potential applications as well as future work and collaborations needed to further improve identification and utilization of CATE estimates to increase patient benefit.
Discussion Video
Below, Richard Peck and Alicia Curth discussing CATE:
Synthetic Model Combination: An Instance-wise Approach to Unsupervised Ensemble Learning
A Chan, M van der Schaar
NeurIPS 2022
Abstract
Consider making a prediction over new test data without any opportunity to learn from a training set of labelled data – instead given access to a set of expert models and their predictions alongside some limited information about the dataset used to train them. In scenarios from finance to the medical sciences, and even consumer practice, stakeholders have developed models on private data they either cannot, or do not want to, share. Given the value and legislation surrounding personal information, it is not surprising that only the models, and not the data, will be released – the pertinent question becoming: how best to use these models?
Previous work has focused on global model selection or ensembling, with the result of a single final model across the feature space. Machine learning models perform notoriously poorly on data outside their training domain however, and so we argue that when ensembling models the weightings for individual instances must reflect their respective domains – in other words models that are more likely to have seen information on that instance should have more attention paid to them. We introduce a method for such an instance-wise ensembling of models, including a novel representation learning step for handling sparse high-dimensional domains.
Finally, we demonstrate the need and generalisability of our method on classical machine learning tasks as well as highlighting a real world use case in the pharmacological setting of vancomycin precision dosing.
Discussion Video
Also, see this conversation between Prof Richard Peck and Alex Chan about Synthetic Model Combination, a novel machine learning method for constructing new model ensembles that changes the game for drug development:
Integrating Expert ODEs into Neural ODEs: Pharmacology and Disease Progression
Z Qian, W R Zame, L M Fleuren, P Elbers, M van der Schaar
NeurIPS 2022
Abstract
Modeling a system’s temporal behaviour in reaction to external stimuli is a fundamental problem in many areas. Pure Machine Learning (ML) approaches often fail in the small sample regime and cannot provide actionable insights beyond predictions. A promising modification has been to incorporate expert domain knowledge into ML models.
The application we consider is predicting the progression of disease under medications, where a plethora of domain knowledge is available from pharmacology. Pharmacological models describe the dynamics of carefully-chosen medically meaningful variables in terms of systems of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). However, these models only describe a limited collection of variables, and these variables are often not observable in clinical environments. To close this gap, we propose the latent hybridisation model (LHM) that integrates a system of expert-designed ODEs with machine-learned Neural ODEs to fully describe the dynamics of the system and to link the expert and latent variables to observable quantities.
We evaluated LHM on synthetic data as well as real-world intensive care data of COVID-19 patients. LHM consistently outperforms previous works, especially when few training samples are available such as at the beginning of the pandemic.
Neural Laplace: Learning diverse classes of differential equations in the Laplace domain
S Holt, Z Qian, M van der Schaar
ICML 2022
Abstract
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations model dynamical systems with ODEs learned by neural networks. However, ODEs are fundamentally inadequate to model systems with long-range dependencies or discontinuities, which are common in engineering and biological systems.
Broader classes of differential equations (DE) have been proposed as remedies, including delay differential equations and integro-differential equations. Furthermore, Neural ODE suffers from numerical instability when modelling stiff ODEs and ODEs with piecewise forcing functions. In this work, we propose Neural Laplace, a unified framework for learning diverse classes of DEs including all the aforementioned ones. Instead of modelling the dynamics in the time domain, we model it in the Laplace domain, where the history-dependencies and discontinuities in time can be represented as summations of complex exponentials. To make learning more efficient, we use the geometrical stereographic map of a Riemann sphere to induce more smoothness in the Laplace domain.
In the experiments, Neural Laplace shows superior performance in modelling and extrapolating the trajectories of diverse classes of DEs, including the ones with complex history dependency and abrupt changes.
Continuous-Time Modeling of Counterfactual Outcomes Using Neural Controlled Differential Equations
N Seedat, F Imrie, A Bellot, Z Qian, M van der Schaar
ICML 2022
Abstract
Systematic quantification of data quality is critical for consistent model performance. Prior works have focused on out-of-distribution data. Instead, we tackle an understudied yet eEstimating counterfactual outcomes over time has the potential to unlock personalized healthcare by assisting decision-makers to answer “what-if” questions. Existing causal inference approaches typically consider regular, discrete-time intervals between observations and treatment decisions and hence are unable to naturally model irregularly sampled data, which is the common setting in practice.
To handle arbitrary observation patterns, we interpret the data as samples from an underlying continuous-time process and propose to model its latent trajectory explicitly using the mathematics of controlled differential equations. This leads to a new approach, the Treatment Effect Neural Controlled Differential Equation (TE-CDE), that allows the potential outcomes to be evaluated at any time point. In addition, adversarial training is used to adjust for time-dependent confounding which is critical in longitudinal settings and is an added challenge not encountered in conventional time-series.
To assess solutions to this problem, we propose a controllable simulation environment based on a model of tumor growth for a range of scenarios with irregular sampling reflective of a variety of clinical scenarios. TE-CDE consistently outperforms existing approaches in all simulated scenarios with irregular sampling.
D-CODE: Discovering Closed-form ODEs from Observed Trajectories
Z Qian, K Kacprzyk, M van der Schaar
ICLR 2022
Abstract
For centuries, scientists have manually designed closed-form ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to model dynamical systems. An automated tool to distill closed-form ODEs from observed trajectories would accelerate the modeling process. Traditionally, symbolic regression is used to uncover a closed-form prediction function a = f(b) with label-features (ai, bi) as training examples,
However, an ODE models the time derivative x(t) of a dynamical system, e.g. x(t) = f(x(t),t), and the “label” x(t) is usually *not* observed. The existing ways to bridge this gap only perform well for a narrow range of settings with low measurement noise, frequent sampling, and non-chaotic dynamics. In this work, we propose the Discovery of Closed-form ODE framework (D-CODE), which advances symbolic regression beyond the paradigm of supervised learning.
D-CODE leverages a novel objective function based on the variational formulation of ODEs to bypass the unobserved time derivative. For formal justification, we prove that this objective is a valid proxy for the estimation error of the true (but unknown) ODE. In the experiments, D-CODE successfully discovered the governing equations of a diverse range of dynamical systems under challenging measurement settings with high noise and infrequent sampling.
Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks
I Bica, J Jordon, M van der Schaar
NeurIPS 2020
Abstract
While much attention has been given to the problem of estimating the effect of discrete interventions from observational data, relatively little work has been done in the setting of continuous-valued interventions, such as treatments associated with a dosage parameter.
In this paper, we tackle this problem by building on a modification of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Our model, SCIGAN, is flexible and capable of simultaneously estimating counterfactual outcomes for several different continuous interventions. The key idea is to use a significantly modified GAN model to learn to generate counterfactual outcomes, which can then be used to learn an inference model, using standard supervised methods, capable of estimating these counterfactuals for a new sample. To address the challenges presented by shifting to continuous interventions, we propose a novel architecture for our discriminator – we build a hierarchical discriminator that leverages the structure of the continuous intervention setting.
Moreover, we provide theoretical results to support our use of the GAN framework and of the hierarchical discriminator. In the experiments section, we introduce a new semi-synthetic data simulation for use in the continuous intervention setting and demonstrate improvements over the existing benchmark models
From Real-World Patient Data to Individualized Treatment Effects Using Machine Learning: Current and Future Methods to Address Underlying Challenges
I Bica, A M Alaa, C Lambert, M van der Schaar
Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 2020
Abstract
Clinical decision making needs to be supported by evidence that treatments are beneficial to individual patients. Although randomized control trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for testing and introducing new drugs, due to the focus on specific questions with respect to establishing efficacy and safety vs. standard treatment, they do not provide a full characterization of the heterogeneity in the final intended treatment population.
Conversely, real-world observational data, such as electronic health records (EHRs), contain large amounts of clinical information about heterogeneous patients and their response to treatments. In this paper, we introduce the main opportunities and challenges in using observational data for training machine learning methods to estimate individualized treatment effects and make treatment recommendations. We describe the modeling choices of the state-of-the-art machine learning methods for causal inference, developed for estimating treatment effects both in the cross-section and longitudinal settings. Additionally, we highlight future research directions that could lead to achieving the full potential of leveraging EHRs and machine learning for making individualized treatment recommendations. We also discuss how experimental data from RCTs and Pharmacometric and Quantitative Systems Pharmacology approaches can be used to not only improve machine learning methods, but also provide ways for validating them.
These future research directions will require us to collaborate across the scientific disciplines to incorporate models based on RCTs and known disease processes, physiology, and pharmacology into these machine learning models based on EHRs to fully optimize the opportunity these data present.
Marika Niihori
