Motivation

Various computational biology calculations require a probabilistic optimization protocol to determine the parameters that capture the system at a desired state in the configurational space. Many existing methods excel at certain scenarios, but fail in others due, in part, to an inefficient exploration of the parameter space and easy trapping into local minima. Here, we developed a general-purpose optimization engine in R that can be plugged to any, simple or complex, modelling initiative through a few lucid interfacing functions, to perform a seamless optimization with rigorous parameter sampling.

Results

ROptimus features simulated annealing and replica exchange implementations equipped with adaptive thermoregulation to drive Monte Carlo optimization process in a flexible manner, through constrained acceptance frequency but unconstrained adaptive pseudo temperature regimens. We exemplify the applicability of our R optimizer to a diverse set of problems spanning data analyses and computational biology tasks.

Availability and implementation

ROptimus is written and implemented in R, and is freely available from CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ROptimus/index.html) and GitHub (http://github.com/SahakyanLab/ROptimus).

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.