MHC Binding Predictor
Project description
mhcflurry
Open source neural network models for peptide-MHC binding affinity prediction
The adaptive immune system depends on the presentation of protein fragments by MHC molecules. Machine learning models of this interaction are used in studies of infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, vaccine development, and cancer immunotherapy.
MHCflurry currently supports peptide / MHC class I affinity prediction using one model per MHC allele. The predictors may be trained on data that has been augmented with data imputed based on other alleles (see Rubinsteyn 2016). We anticipate adding additional models, including pan-allele and class II predictors.
You can fit MHCflurry models to your own data or download trained models that we provide. Our models are trained on data from IEDB and Kim 2014. See here for details on the training data preparation. The steps we use to train predictors on this data, including hyperparameter selection using cross validation, are here.
The MHCflurry predictors are implemented in Python using keras.
Setup
Install the package:
pip install mhcflurry
Then download our datasets and trained models:
mhcflurry-downloads fetch
From a checkout you can run the unit tests with:
nosetests .
Making predictions
from mhcflurry import predict
predict(alleles=['A0201'], peptides=['SIINFEKL'])
Allele Peptide Prediction 0 A0201 SIINFEKL 10672.347656
Training your own models
This unit test gives a simple example of how to train a predictor in Python. There is also a script called mhcflurry-class1-allele-specific-cv-and-train that will perform cross validation and model selection given a CSV file of training data. Try mhcflurry-class1-allele-specific-cv-and-train --help for details.
Details on the downloaded class I allele-specific models
Besides the actual model weights, the data downloaded with mhcflurry-downloads fetch also includes a CSV file giving the hyperparameters used for each predictor. Another CSV gives the cross validation results used to select these hyperparameters.
To see the hyperparameters for the production models, run:
open "$(mhcflurry-downloads path models_class1_allele_specific_single)/production.csv"
To see the cross validation results:
open "$(mhcflurry-downloads path models_class1_allele_specific_single)/cv.csv"
Environment variables
The path where MHCflurry looks for model weights and data can be set with the MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_DIR environment variable. This directory should contain subdirectories like “models_class1_allele_specific_single”. Setting this variable overrides the other environment variables described below.
If you only want to change the version of the released data used, you can set MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_CURRENT_RELEASE. If you want to change the base directory used for all releases, set MHCFLURRY_DATA_DIR.
By default, MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_DIR is a platform specific application storage directory, MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_CURRENT_RELEASE is the latest release, and MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_DIR is set to $MHCFLURRY_DATA_DIR/$MHCFLURRY_DOWNLOADS_CURRENT_RELEASE.
Project details
Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
Download files
Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.