amazing, who thought machine learning will help on finding variant is dangerous or not without going to lab !
BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#62Very good News,
I hope this will save a lot of souls
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#63No post body was provided.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#64This is not my area and I read the press release but not the paper -- but I cannot help noticing that they mention a sensitivity/recall number (>90%) but not a specificity or precision number. Even if you're not trying to be cynical or skeptical about this, when there are this few true positive examples available, how can one plausibly do a good job calibrating such a system?
That's the key bit here. Supervised learning is not applicable here and any sort of fitting to known labels is doomed to fail.
The system is not calibrated, tuned or parameterized. The ML part learns in a self-supervised manner what are the spike sequence features important for a successful (proliferating) coronavirus (or - more correctly - learns low-dimensional embeddings of multi-point interactions/co-occurrences of different amino acids in spike proteins). The rest is based on either frequentist statistics, or computational biochemistry.
At no point in training EWS any information about certain sequences belonging to High Risk Variant classes (Variant of Concern, Variant of Interest etc.) is fed to EWS.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#65Great, finally one real example where AI can really help with this pandemic
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#66amazing, who thought machine learning will help on finding variant is dangerous or not without going to lab !
Not exactly "finding out", but rather estimating. It's all about prioritizing testing through detecting suspiciously "good" and unexpected outliers popping up.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the wikipedia page you linked: > Molnupiravir is indicated for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.[1][5] So after the risk of creating mutations in the Covid virus has been assessed and weighed against the chances of patients just outright dying due to not…
Is the risk different from the risks of antibiotics and antifungals with respect to creating resistant strains?
Well, first off "normal" antibiotics don't kill viruses so that kinda makes it different from the start. But even then, most antibiotics kill bacteria etc through disrupting their cellular processes and leaves the DNA mostly alone. Resistance against antibiotics is created through natural evolution; those bacteria that can survive better in an environment where antibiotics will reproduce more than their cousins which can't.
OTOH, Molnupiravir works by: (quoting from Wikipedia again)
> [it] exerts its antiviral action through introduction of copying errors during viral RNA replication.
So it deliberately stops virus reproduction by introducing errors in RNA copying. The vast majority of time this just makes the virus nonfunctional, but it is technically not impossible that it creates a viable mutated strain. This mutated strain may or may not be worse than the original virus. It is not unsimilar to how `cat /dev/urandom | bash` just MIGHT start off with `rm -rf /` and delete everything, but usually it will just create a crash because the random bytes don't parse into a valid bash command.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it’s possible to justify the risk with saving lives. Because creating mutations and prolonged pandemics are more profitable.
The government looses money from pandemics, so there’s no profit motive for FDA regulators to prolong the pandemic. There’s both direct costs of coronavirus response, and then there’s indirect costs (lower tax revenue from empty downtowns, less travel, more workers on taking from disability insurance instead of paying in to it, etc).
Pharma companies are making profits and there is a revolving door between regulators and industry, so your dismissal of profit motive is a joke.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#69No post body was provided.
Re: BioNTech-InstaDeep Early Warning System to Detect High-Risk SARS-CoV-2 Variants
#70Is this literally a joke? This might as well be a doomsday machine driven by weak AI selecting new Greek glyphs to drive demand for new superfluous covid vaccines. I'm fully vaccinated, but more data points to come up with media fear mongering is the last thing anyone in the developed world needs right now.
One of the authors states here that the goal was to create sanity(data) for the press to reference on each new variant.