’Transformational’ approach to machine learning could accelerate search for new disease treatments

Woman in grey shirt Credit: mahdis mousavi via Unsplash Researchers have developed a new approach to machine learning that 'learns how to learn' and out-performs current machine learning methods for drug design, which in turn could accelerate the search for new disease treatments. I was surprised how well it works - better than anything else we know for drug design Ross King The method, called transformational machine learning (TML), was developed by a team from the UK, Sweden, India and Netherlands. It learns from multiple problems and improves performance while it learns. TML could accelerate the identification and production of new drugs by improving the machine learning systems which are used to identify them. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Most types of machine learning (ML) use labelled examples, and these examples are almost always represented in the computer using intrinsic features, such as the colour or shape of an object. The computer then forms general rules that relate the features to the labels.