admixture-cache

Precomputed-P supervised-ADMIXTURE projection cache. Build the slow training pass once per panel × K × clusters_yaml combo; project new targets in ~2 seconds.

Why this exists

Supervised ADMIXTURE training on a real-world panel takes hours to days per restart (K=21 regional cache: ~12-14 hr × 5 restarts; K=4 ancestral_cluster: ~5-7 hr × 5 restarts). For consumer pipelines serving many users, re-running this training per target is wasteful — the P matrix is determined almost entirely by the panel, not the target.

admixture-cache splits the supervised-ADMIXTURE workflow into:

1. Panel cache build (operator, slow, one-time per panel update): stock ADMIXTURE × N restarts → cache best-LL P matrix + multimodality SD + manifest.
2. Per-target projection (consumer, fast, every run): align target.bed to cached panel variants + axes (plink2), load dosages, solve for Q via scipy SLSQP under the standard binomial admixture likelihood.

The projection math matches stock ADMIXTURE Q values to within ~1e-5 absolute on representative workloads (15K × 850K matrix at K=4).

Install

pip install admixture-cache

Python 3.11 through 3.14 are supported. End-to-end paths require ADMIXTURE (for build) and plink2 (for project / verify) on PATH. Pure-library use without those binaries is fine — only the build/projection orchestrators shell out.

Quickstart — library

from pathlib import Path
from admixture_cache import build_panel_cache, project_target

# One-time, slow (~hours per restart per cache)
manifest = build_panel_cache(
    panel_bed=Path("panel.bed"),
    panel_pop_file=Path("panel.pop"),
    clusters_yaml=Path("clusters.yaml"),
    k=21,
    cache_dir=Path("data/regional_k21_cache/"),
    admixture_runner=my_tool_runner,  # see ToolRunner Protocol below
    track="regional",
    panel_id="aadr_v66_ho",
    panel_version="v66.0",
    admixture_version="1.4.0",
    seeds=[1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
    sd_threshold=0.02,
)

# Per-target, fast (~2 seconds end-to-end)
result = project_target(
    target_bed=Path("target.bed"),
    cache_dir=Path("data/regional_k21_cache/"),
    plink2_runner=my_plink2_runner,
    work_dir=Path("scratch/projection/"),
)
print(result.target_q)               # K-vector
print(result.cluster_order)          # K names
print(result.panel_stability_max_sd) # cached panel restart_sd

Quickstart — CLI

Installing the package registers the admixture-cache console script with four subcommands:

# 1. Build a panel cache (slow, one-time).
admixture-cache build \
    --panel-bed panel.bed \
    --panel-pop panel.pop \
    --clusters-yaml clusters.yaml \
    --k 21 \
    --cache-dir data/regional_k21_cache/ \
    --track regional \
    --panel-id aadr_v66_ho \
    --panel-version v66.0 \
    --seeds 1,2,3,4,5

# 2. Project a target against an existing cache (fast).
admixture-cache project \
    --target-bed target.bed \
    --cache-dir data/regional_k21_cache/ \
    --work-dir scratch/projection/

# 3. Check whether a cache matches the current panel/YAML/K config.
admixture-cache verify \
    --panel-bed panel.bed \
    --clusters-yaml clusters.yaml \
    --k 21 \
    --cache-dir data/regional_k21_cache/

# 4. Fetch a canonical published cache from GitHub Releases.
admixture-cache download --list                            # enumerate
admixture-cache download regional_k21_aadr_v66_ho          # install
admixture-cache download regional_k21_aadr_v66_ho \
    --cache-root ~/.admixture-cache/caches \
    --cache-version v2 \
    --force                                                # pin + overwrite

Caches install at <cache-root>/<name>/ (default: ~/.admixture-cache/caches/, or $ADMIXTURE_CACHE_ROOT if set). The downloader streams the tarball, verifies its SHA-256, validates the extracted manifest, and atomically renames into place — partial downloads never leave a half-installed cache.

Publishing your own canonical caches: see docs/PUBLISH_CACHE.md for the tag convention + tarball format the discovery code expects.

The default SubprocessToolRunner runs the local admixture / plink2 binaries on PATH; override with --admixture-binary / --plink2-binary to point at a specific build.

build, project, and verify all surface a non-zero exit code on failure with a descriptive error: … line on stderr. project --json emits machine-readable JSON instead of human-readable text.

ToolRunner Protocol

When calling the library from Python (rather than via the CLI), pass any object satisfying the ToolRunner Protocol:

from collections.abc import Callable
from pathlib import Path

class MyToolRunner:
    def run(
        self,
        *,
        args: list[str],
        cwd: Path,
        log_dir: Path,
        timeout_seconds: int = 600,
        # The two kwargs below are OPTIONAL but REQUIRED for
        # parallel `build_panel_cache` (max_parallel_restarts > 1):
        log_name: str | None = None,
        pid_callback: Callable[[int], None] | None = None,
    ) -> object:
        ...

• log_name — admixture-cache passes the per-restart canonical log filename (e.g. restart_3.out). Honor it when set; fall back to your own naming scheme when None. Required for parallel mode (concurrent restarts share log_dir and need disambiguated filenames).
• pid_callback — call with the subprocess PID immediately after spawning. admixture-cache uses this to SIGTERM in-flight restarts on first-failure cancellation. Required for parallel mode.
• Spawn subprocesses with start_new_session=True so each child gets its own process group. The cancellation path signals the pgid (via os.killpg) rather than the bare PID — avoids the classic UNIX PID-recycle race when a subprocess exits between PID capture and the cancellation pass.

Adapters that forward via **kwargs (e.g. def run(self, **kwargs): return self._inner.run(**kwargs)) are recognized as supporting both extensions — but the inner runner MUST actually honor them. A **kwargs forwarder that silently strips unknown kwargs will pass the parallel-mode guard but produce incoherent logs and broken cancellation.

For non-parallel use (max_parallel_restarts=1), both extensions are optional — only the four baseline kwargs are required.

Cache directory layout

After build_panel_cache succeeds, cache_dir contains:

cache_dir/
├── panel.K.P              # Best-LL restart's allele freqs (M × K)
├── panel.K.Q              # Best-LL restart's non-target Q (N × K)
├── panel.bim              # Variant set + REF/ALT axes (alignment ref)
├── restart_sd.json        # Per-cluster SD across restarts
├── cluster_order.json     # K column → cluster name mapping
├── manifest.json          # Panel SHA + YAML SHA + K + version pins
└── build_logs/            # ADMIXTURE stdout/stderr per restart

Cache validity is determined by manifest.json SHAs matching the current config (panel.bim, clusters_yaml, K, optional geo-filter YAMLs). Any mismatch → consumer code can fall back to a full ADMIXTURE training pass or rebuild the cache.

When to use this

• Multi-user services: cache once, project for every user (~5,000× per-target speedup at scale)
• Reproducibility: published canonical caches (forthcoming via GitHub Releases) give byte-identical P across consumers
• CI/CD: faster integration tests once you have a cache

When NOT to use this

• One-time analyses with a custom panel that won't be reused — full ADMIXTURE is simpler
• Novel methodologies requiring per-target P refinement — the projection assumes P is fully determined by the panel

Status

• v1.4 — Current. Drops the consumer-specific track enum constraint; the track and continent manifest fields are now free-text provenance labels.
• v1.3 — Adds the admixture-cache download command + download_cache / list_available_caches / CacheRelease Python API. Canonical caches are published as GitHub Releases following the cache-<name>-<version> tag convention (see docs/PUBLISH_CACHE.md).
• v1.2 — End-to-end integration suite against real ADMIXTURE 1.4 + plink2.
• v1.1 — NUMA pinning, PGEN target format support, Hypothesis property tests.
• v1.0 — First PyPI release. Cache directory layout stable at schema v1; numerical parity validated against stock ADMIXTURE.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full per-release detail.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, the three local validation gates (pytest / ruff / mypy), commit conventions, and the tag → OIDC PyPI release procedure. See DEVELOPMENT.md for the architecture map, design rationale, and module-level walkthroughs.

Acknowledgments

This library was extracted from ancestry-pipeline's in-pipeline supervised-ADMIXTURE projection module (pop_automation/admixture_projection.py, ~744 LOC, validated against real-world workloads). The split lets sibling projects depend on the cache layer without pulling in the larger orchestrator.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.