A simple, lightweight python package for genetic algorithms on molecules. Key features:
- 📦 Works out-of-the-box (see example below).
- 🛠 Modular design: easy to extend/override default behaviour.
- 🧑🤝🧑 Batch-native: always calls objective function in batches for flexible parallelization.
- ⚙️ Minimal dependencies. Should be compatible with nearly all python environments.
- ⛓️ Supports parallel mutation/crossover with
joblib. - 🎓 Smart caching of objective function (avoids duplicate calls).
Install from PyPI:
pip install mol_gaIn my research, I've found GAs to be pretty powerful algorithms for molecular optimization,
but found problems in open-source implementations.
With mol_ga I hope to fill the niche for a lightweight, standalone GA implementation
that researchers can use quickly.
There are countless variations of genetic algorithms.
This library provides a fairly general implementation in general_ga.py
and sensible defaults in mol_ga.default_ga.
The abstract GA consists of the following steps:
- Sampling members from a "population" of SMILES (default: sample uniformly from top quantiles)
- Use the samples from step 1 to produce new candidate SMILES (default: use Graph GA mutation/crossover operators)
- Score the new candidate SMILES with the objective function and add them to the population.
- Shrink the population if it is too large (default: choose the molecules with the highest score)
This design lets you run something reasonable in just a few lines of code, while also allowing you to use more advanced features such as:
- Mutating SMILES with something else (e.g. convert to SELFIES string and add/delete/modify random token): override default from step 2.
- Fancy population selection (e.g. preserving diversity, accounting for constraints): override step 4 (and maybe step 1)
Using this library is simple: specify the objective function, the starting population (or use our defaults), and a few parameters.
import joblib
from rdkit import Chem
from rdkit.Chem import QED
from mol_ga import mol_libraries, default_ga
# Function to optimize: we choose QED.
# mol_ga is designed for batch functions so it inputs a list of SMILES and outputs a list of floats.
f_opt = lambda s_list: [QED.qed(Chem.MolFromSmiles(s)) for s in s_list]
# Starting molecules: we choose random molecules from ZINC
# (we provide an easy handle for this)
start_smiles = mol_libraries.random_zinc(1000)
# Run GA with fast parallel generation
with joblib.Parallel(n_jobs=-1) as parallel:
ga_results = default_ga(
starting_population_smiles=start_smiles,
scoring_function=f_opt,
max_generations=100,
offspring_size=100,
parallel=parallel,
)
# Print the best molecule
print(max(ga_results.population))Output (remember it is random so results will vary between runs and between machines):
(0.948131065160597, 'C[C@H]1CCN(C(=O)C(c2ccccc2)c2ccccc2)O[C@H]1N')
There is no citation for this specific library, but I will put a paper on arXiv soon.
To make this library, I mainly drew on the algorithm from Jensen (2019) and the code from the GuacaMol paper. Please cite these papers if you use this library in an academic publication:
@article{jensen2019graph,
title={A graph-based genetic algorithm and generative model/Monte Carlo tree search for the exploration of chemical space},
author={Jensen, Jan H},
journal={Chemical science},
volume={10},
number={12},
pages={3567--3572},
year={2019},
publisher={Royal Society of Chemistry}
}
@article{brown2019guacamol,
title={GuacaMol: benchmarking models for de novo molecular design},
author={Brown, Nathan and Fiscato, Marco and Segler, Marwin HS and Vaucher, Alain C},
journal={Journal of chemical information and modeling},
volume={59},
number={3},
pages={1096--1108},
year={2019},
publisher={ACS Publications}
}
This is an open-source project and PRs are welcome!
!!PLEASE READ THIS SECTION BEFORE MAKING A PR!!
Use pre-commit to enforce formatting, large file checks, etc. Please set this up if you will add code to this repository.
conda install pre-commit # only if not installed already
pre-commit installNow a series of useful checks will be run before any commit.
We use pytest to test the codebase.
Everything can be run with the following line of code:
python -m pytestPlease make sure tests pass on your PR.
Currently the package is set up to publish on PyPI when new tagged releases are created.
If your problem involves generating molecules in 2D, I think the answer is almost certainly yes. I think that most papers in this space should run GraphGA as a baseline, and that many researchers unfairly dismiss GAs because they don't understand them very well. Here are my responses to various objections to GAs:
- "GAs are not sample-efficient": in general I agree, but Gao et al showed that they are surprisingly competitive with supposedly more sample-efficient methods. Nonetheless, GAs definitely can be part of a sample-efficient optimization pipeline: for example, they can be used to optimize the acquisition function for Bayesian optimization.
- "I care about diversity, and GAs do not produce diverse outputs": most algorithms don't explicitly optimize for diversity, and therefore produce diversity "by accident". Graph GAs are no different in this regard. You don't know how diverse your outputs will be until you try it.
- "I am doing mult-objective optimization": try scalarizing your problem with multiple sets of weights to explore the space of trade-offs.
- "I am just trying to generate novel molecules without any objective function.": just use a constant objective function and the GA will continually produce new molecules.
- Objective function is deterministic (always outputs the same value for the same SMILES). If the function passed in is not deterministic, the GA will end up using the first value it returns.
- Objective function is scalar-valued (I may add support for non-scalar objectives in the future).
- Value is the same for all SMILES corresponding to the same molecule. Internally the algorithm will generally canonlicalize all SMILES, but it is possible for something to slip through. The GA might behave weirdly if the function returns different values for different SMILES strings for the same molecule.
Many objective functions can be evaluated more easily in a batched setting, such as:
- Outputs of a machine learning model (neural network).
- Performing expensive simulations (they could be done in parallel)
By ensuring that the GA calls the objective function in batches whenever possible it enables maximum speedup from batching. However, the downside of this is users are responsible for their own batching: for example, if your ML model can only operate in batches of size <= 32, then you are responsible for breaking down a batch of possibly more than 32 molecules into chunks of size <= 32.
I've tried to make many improvements:
- Fix bug where certain molecules can be "lost" from the population during mutation.
- Randomness can be controlled by passing a
random.Randomobject (their implementation just uses the system random) - Changed population selection to a method based on quantiles rather than weighted sampling, using the objective function values as the weights. The original method had a few disadvantages which are resolved by sampling based on quantiles:
- Doesn't work for negative objective functions.
- If just one point with a high-score is found, it can easily dominate the sampling.
- If the population size is too high, the best molecules get "crowded out" by less good ones.
- Because of the sampling change above, it can handle large population sizes (e.g. 10k). This helps prevent the population collapsing to a bunch of similar molecules.
- Removed some weird lines of code that effectively prevents the algorithm from producing molecules with more than 50 atoms. While it is true that most drugs are not this large, the algorithm should not be inherently incapable of producing molecules of more than a certain size!